🔗 Share this article

The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive Game of the Year candidate, but also an enormous financial hit. Studio Sandfall Interactive along with publisher Kepler Interactive announced that this title exceeded 5 million units sold, and that’s despite its status as a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success was an unexpected turn for the team. I firmly believed that we'd create a solid title achieving reasonable sales results,” the COO and producer commented.

The CTO and lead programmer remarked that Clair Obscur’s critical score, which currently sits at 93, was the most surprising moment to the studio compared to “our initial expectations and the actual outcome of the field was. Because when it dropped everybody in the studio were cheering loudly. It was really frantic.”

That success resulted in work on new free content for the game featuring fresh areas, foes, and boss fights, as announced will release sometime soon.

However, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect the team will expand. Our team includes a great team guided by a visionary director with a clear direction for the project and future concepts. We intend to preserve the close-knit size that led to our success and perhaps create major titles sequentially,” they said.

The size of Sandfall drummed up significant conversation when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, considered this studio as a perfect example for game development. Although the team is and was relatively lean next to major studios, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits reveals numerous contributors participated; the French studio contracted a Korean team handling movement and effects, for example.

“We plan to recruit a little more definitely when facing an increase in development in the coming years,” the executive stated. “However, I envision more of a workshop comprising a handful highly skilled individuals that can make collective masterpieces.” It was stated that the studio's philosophy as developers “focuses on preserving the key advantages that made this achievement possible originally.”

While it may be not the right time to reveal exact details what’s next — and trust me, efforts were made — the team does know what’s at its core. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of what we built,” the lead programmer explained. “It's still premature to specify what will interest us, yet we must to adhere to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

The lead programmer noted that the project began with the visionary developing his passion title. We aspire this approach we will be able to do as well for future productions.”