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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just an impressive GOTY candidate, it’s also a massive sales triumph. Developer the development team and publisher their publishing partner announced that this title surpassed five million copies in sales, and that’s even with it being a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

Its success came as a shock to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we would have a solid title achieving moderate sales results,” the COO and producer commented.

A technical director remarked the game's Metacritic rating, which currently sits at 93, came as perhaps the greatest surprise” for everyone relative to what we anticipated and the actual outcome proved to be. Because when it dropped the entire team celebrated excitedly. The energy was electric.”

This triumph resulted in work on a free update for the title featuring fresh areas, enemies, plus epic encounters, reportedly is coming in the next few months.

However, while the game is growing, fans shouldn't anticipate the studio to grow. “We have a talented crew under clear creative leadership who has a great vision for the project plus upcoming innovations. We intend to preserve the small-team dynamic that made this possible then develop one big game after another,” the producer said.

The size of Sandfall generated significant conversation when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, considered this studio as the “ideal” for game development. Despite being indeed a small team compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits reveals dozens of people worked on it; the French studio contracted a Korean team to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“We will hire a bit more certainly when facing an increase in development down the line,” they stated. “Yet I picture essentially a craft studio of a few highly skilled individuals that can make artistic collaborations.” It was stated that the studio's philosophy as a company “focuses on preserving the key advantages that enabled this success originally.”

While it may be not the right time to reveal exact details about future projects — rest assured, I tried to get them to — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of our creations,” they explained. “It's still premature to be able to tell what will interest us, but it's important also to remain faithful to our studio's essence through compelling worlds plus innovative play that excites us.”

The developer mentioned that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 began with the visionary developing his passion title. We aspire that's something we will be able to do with upcoming games.”