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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top GOTY candidate, but also an enormous sales triumph. Developer the development team along with publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title exceeded 5 million units in sales, this is in spite of it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success came as quite a shock for the team. “I was strongly believing that we would have an enjoyable experience achieving some average commercial success,” a key executive explained.

The CTO and lead programmer noted that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, came as the greatest surprise” for everyone compared to our early predictions and what the reality proved to be. When the score released all staff members were cheering loudly. It felt absolutely wild.”

This triumph has led to work on a complimentary expansion for the game featuring fresh areas, enemies, along with challenging bosses, which they said will release sometime soon.

However, as the title expands, it's unlikely they'll hire extensively. We've built a great team guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for the project and also for new ideas. Our goal is to maintain the close-knit size that worked for this game then develop large projects one by one,” they said.

The studio's scale drummed up plenty of debate upon the title's release. A few well-known creators, such as the famed director, viewed this studio as a perfect example for a studio. Although the team is and was indeed a small team next to major studios, checking the title's staff list shows that numerous contributors were involved; the French studio contracted a Korean team to work on gameplay animations, to illustrate.

“We plan to recruit a little more definitely should there be next an upcoming production peak down the line,” the producer commented. “However, I envision rather a creative atelier of a few highly skilled individuals capable of producing a work of art together.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as a studio “focuses on preserving the successful elements that led to this accomplishment originally.”

Despite being not the right time to disclose concrete plans about future projects — and trust me, I attempted to learn more — the developers understand what’s at its core. “The turn-based aspect, I think it's in the DNA of this project,” they said. “It's a bit too early to specify our next interests, but it's important also to remain faithful to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe plus innovative play that drives our passion.”

They added that the project originated from the visionary pursuing his ideal project. We aspire that philosophy we will be able to do in coming projects.”