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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY contender, it’s also an enormous sales triumph. Studio the development team and publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that this title exceeded five million copies sold, this is in spite of it being a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance was a shock to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we would have an enjoyable experience achieving moderate sales results,” the COO and producer stated.

The CTO and lead programmer remarked that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, now standing at 93, was “maybe the biggest shock to the studio versus “our initial expectations and what the reality turned out to be. When the score released the entire team were cheering loudly. It was really frantic.”

The positive reception has led to Sandfall developing a free update for the game with a new environment, foes, and boss fights, as announced will release sometime soon.

However, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect the team will expand. We've built a great team guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for the project and also for new ideas. We intend to preserve the human scale that made this possible then develop major titles sequentially,” they added.

The size of Sandfall drummed up significant conversation upon the title's release. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, viewed the development group as a perfect example for game development. Although the team is and was truly compact versus large developers, a quick look at Expedition 33’s credits reveals many individuals worked on it; the French studio contracted a Korean team to work on gameplay animations, as an instance.

“We will hire a bit more certainly when facing next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” the executive commented. “Yet I picture essentially a craft studio with a small number of exceptionally gifted creators that create artistic collaborations.” It was stated that their core belief as a studio “is more to maintain the successful elements that enabled this success in the first place.”

Although it's not the right time to reveal exact details about future projects — rest assured, I tried to get them to — the team does know their essential identity. “The turn-based aspect, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” a developer said. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell future passions, but it's important also to adhere to the DNA of studio with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

They mentioned that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 started with the visionary “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that philosophy will be repeated as well for future productions.”