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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive Game of the Year contender, but also a massive commercial success. Studio the development team and publisher Kepler Interactive announced that the game surpassed 5 million units in sales, and that’s in spite of it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

This achievement came as a surprise for the team. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a good game that would meet reasonable market performance,” a senior team member stated.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, now standing at 93, was the most surprising moment to the team versus what we anticipated and the final result of the field was. Because when it dropped everybody in the studio celebrated excitedly. It felt absolutely wild.”

The positive reception resulted in the studio creating a complimentary expansion for players featuring fresh areas, adversaries, plus epic encounters, which they said is coming sometime soon.

Nevertheless, as the title expands, it's unlikely the studio to grow. Our team includes an excellent group under clear creative leadership who has a great vision for the project plus upcoming innovations. We'd like to keep the close-knit size that worked for this game and do maybe major titles sequentially,” the executive said.

The size of Sandfall generated significant conversation upon the title's release. Certain industry figures, like Hideo Kojima, considered this studio as the model for game development. Although the team is and was truly compact compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at the game's credits shows that numerous contributors participated; Sandfall hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, as an instance.

“We plan to recruit a little more definitely if we have a future production surge in the coming years,” the executive stated. “However, I envision essentially a craft studio of a few highly skilled individuals capable of producing artistic collaborations.” They emphasized that the studio's philosophy as a studio “aims to keep the successful elements that made this achievement possible originally.”

While it may be not the right time to reveal exact details regarding upcoming titles — rest assured, I attempted to learn more — the team does know their essential identity. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” a developer explained. “It's a bit too early to specify our next interests, yet we must to stay true to our studio's essence through compelling worlds plus innovative play that excites us.”

The developer mentioned that the project originated from their director “work[ing] on his dream game. We aspire that philosophy we will be able to do with upcoming games.”