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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top Game of the Year contender, but also an enormous financial hit. Developer Sandfall Interactive along with publisher their publishing partner announced that the game exceeded five million copies sold, and that’s despite it being a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance came as a surprise to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a solid title achieving reasonable sales results,” a senior team member commented.

Another leading developer noted this title's Metacritic rating, now standing at 93, came as perhaps the greatest surprise” to the team relative to “our initial expectations and the final result turned out to be. When the score released all staff members celebrated excitedly. The energy was electric.”

This triumph prompted Sandfall developing a free update for the title including novel settings, foes, along with challenging bosses, which they said would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.

However, as the title expands, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. We've built a great team with a strong creative director possessing strong ideas for the project plus upcoming innovations. We intend to preserve the small-team dynamic that worked for this game and perhaps create major titles sequentially,” the producer said.

Their team size generated a storm of discussion when the game came out. A few well-known creators, such as the famed director, looked at the development group as the model for a studio. Despite being truly compact compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits indicates many individuals worked on it; the French studio hired a team in Korea for animation work, to illustrate.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more certainly when facing next an upcoming production peak in upcoming years,” the executive commented. “But I would see essentially a craft studio comprising a handful highly skilled individuals capable of producing collective masterpieces.” They emphasized that Sandfall’s vision as developers “focuses on preserving the strengths that enabled this success from the start.”

While it may be premature for the studio to say specifically regarding upcoming titles — rest assured, efforts were made — they are certain what’s at its core. “The turn-based aspect, forms the foundation of this project,” the lead programmer said. “It's still premature to specify future passions, however, it's crucial to remain faithful to our creative core featuring rich storytelling plus innovative play that drives our passion.”

They noted how this game began with the visionary pursuing his ideal project. We aspire that's something we will be able to do in coming projects.”