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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top GOTY contender, but also an enormous commercial success. Studio Sandfall Interactive and publisher their publishing partner announced that the game exceeded 5 million units in sales, and that’s despite it being a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

This achievement was a surprise to the developers. “I was strongly believing that we would have a solid title achieving some average market performance,” a key executive stated.

The CTO and lead programmer remarked that Clair Obscur’s review aggregate, now standing at 93, came as perhaps the greatest surprise” for everyone compared to what we anticipated and the actual outcome proved to be. Once it was published all staff members were cheering loudly. It felt absolutely wild.”

This triumph prompted Sandfall developing new free content for the game with a new environment, adversaries, plus epic encounters, as announced would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.

That said, while the game is growing, it's unlikely they'll hire extensively. “We have an excellent group guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for the project and also for new ideas. We'd like to keep the small-team dynamic that worked for this game then develop one big game after another,” the producer said.

The size of Sandfall drummed up significant conversation upon the title's release. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, viewed Sandfall’s team as the model for creative teams. Despite being indeed a small team versus large developers, checking Expedition 33’s credits shows that dozens of people worked on it; the French studio contracted a Korean team for animation work, as an instance.

“Some hiring will occur a little more certainly should there be next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” they said. “However, I envision rather a creative atelier with a small number of really talented people capable of producing collective masterpieces.” They emphasized that Sandfall’s vision as a company “is more to maintain the key advantages that enabled this success from the start.”

Despite being not the right time to say specifically what’s next — rest assured, efforts were made — they are certain their fundamental principles. “Strategic combat, forms the foundation of our creations,” a developer explained. “It's a bit too early to announce what will interest us, but it's important also to adhere to the DNA of studio featuring rich storytelling and the interesting gameplay that inspires the team.”

They added how this game began with their director pursuing his ideal project. And hopefully that's something will be repeated as well for future productions.”