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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top GOTY contender, it’s also an enormous financial hit. Studio Sandfall Interactive along with publisher their publishing partner announced that this title topped five million copies sold, and that’s despite it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance was a shock to the developers. I was convinced that we would have a good game that would meet reasonable sales results,” a key executive commented.

The CTO and lead programmer remarked that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, came as perhaps the most surprising moment to the team relative to our early predictions and the final result of the field was. Because when it dropped the entire team were cheering loudly. It felt absolutely wild.”

This triumph resulted in work on new free content for the game with a new environment, adversaries, and boss fights, as announced will release in the next few months.

That said, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect the team will expand. “We have a talented crew with a strong creative director possessing strong ideas for the project plus upcoming innovations. We'd like to keep the close-knit size that made this possible and perhaps create major titles sequentially,” they said.

Their team size drummed up plenty of debate when the game came out. Certain industry figures, such as the famed director, viewed Sandfall’s team as the “ideal” for a studio. Despite being indeed a small team next to major studios, checking Expedition 33’s credits reveals many individuals worked on it; the French studio hired a team in Korea for animation work, as an instance.

“We plan to recruit a bit more certainly if we have an increase in development in the coming years,” they stated. “But I would see rather a creative atelier comprising a handful exceptionally gifted creators that create artistic collaborations.” It was stated that their core belief as a company “focuses on preserving the strengths that led to this accomplishment originally.”

Although it's too early for Sandfall to say specifically about future projects — believe me, I tried to get them to — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” a developer remarked. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell our next interests, yet we must to stay true to our creative core featuring rich storytelling and engaging mechanics that drives our passion.”

They added that the project originated from the visionary developing his passion title. We aspire this approach we can continue as well for future productions.”