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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong Game of the Year candidate, but also an enormous sales triumph. Developer Sandfall Interactive along with publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title surpassed 5 million units in sales, and that’s despite its status as a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

Its success came as quite a surprise to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we'd create a good game garnering some average market performance,” a senior team member explained.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out the game's review aggregate, which currently sits at 93, came as perhaps the greatest surprise” for everyone versus our early predictions and the actual outcome turned out to be. Once it was published all staff members were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

This triumph has led to Sandfall developing a free update for players with a new environment, foes, along with challenging bosses, as announced would be out in the next few months.

However, despite the game's evolution, it's unlikely they'll hire extensively. “We have a great team under clear creative leadership possessing strong ideas for this game and also for new ideas. Our goal is to maintain the small-team dynamic that worked for this game and perhaps create major titles sequentially,” they noted.

The studio's scale generated significant conversation following launch. A few well-known creators, such as the famed director, viewed the development group as the “ideal” for game development. While Sandfall was and is indeed a small team next to major studios, a quick look at the game's credits indicates numerous contributors were involved; the French studio contracted a Korean team for animation work, as an instance.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more for sure should there be an increase in development in upcoming years,” the producer said. “However, I envision essentially a craft studio comprising a handful exceptionally gifted creators that can make a work of art together.” It was stated that the studio's philosophy as a company “is more to maintain the strengths that led to this accomplishment originally.”

Although it's premature for the studio to reveal exact details what’s next — rest assured, I tried to get them to — the team does know their essential identity. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” they said. “It's still premature to be able to tell future passions, yet we must to adhere to our creative core through compelling worlds and engaging mechanics that inspires the team.”

The developer added that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 originated from the creative director pursuing his ideal project. We aspire that philosophy we will be able to do in coming projects.”