🔗 Share this article

The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a strong GOTY contender, but also a massive financial hit. Developer the development team and publisher their publishing partner announced that the game topped 5 million units in sales, this is even with it being a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

Its success came as a surprise to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we'd create a good game garnering some average commercial success,” a key executive commented.

Another leading developer pointed out that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, now standing at 93, came as the greatest surprise” to the team versus what we anticipated and the actual outcome turned out to be. Because when it dropped everybody in the studio were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

That success resulted in the studio creating a free update for the title with a new environment, adversaries, and boss fights, as announced would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, fans shouldn't anticipate the studio to grow. We've built a great team guided by a visionary director with a clear direction for this game plus upcoming innovations. We'd like to keep the human scale that made this possible and do maybe one big game after another,” the executive added.

Their team size drummed up a storm of discussion when the game came out. Certain industry figures, such as the famed director, looked at Sandfall’s team as the model for a studio. Despite being relatively lean next to major studios, one glance at the game's credits shows that numerous contributors worked on it; Sandfall hired a team in Korea for animation work, as an instance.

“We will hire slightly more definitely if we have next an upcoming production peak in upcoming years,” the producer said. “But I would see essentially a craft studio with a small number of highly skilled individuals capable of producing a work of art together.” It was stated that their core belief as a company “aims to keep the key advantages that led to this accomplishment in the first place.”

Despite being premature for the studio to reveal exact details what’s next — and trust me, I attempted to learn more — the team does know what’s at its core. “The turn-based aspect, forms the foundation of our creations,” a developer remarked. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell future passions, however, it's crucial to adhere to the DNA of studio with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

The developer added how this game began with their director “work[ing] on his dream game. We aspire this approach we will be able to do with upcoming games.”