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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a top GOTY contender, it’s also a massive financial hit. Developer the development team and publisher their publishing partner disclosed that this title surpassed five million copies in sales, and that’s despite it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance came as quite an unexpected turn to Sandfall. I was convinced that we'd create a solid title achieving some average sales results,” a key executive commented.

The CTO and lead programmer noted that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, came as perhaps the greatest surprise” to the studio relative to “our initial expectations and the final result proved to be. Because when it dropped everybody in the studio was screaming and jumping. It felt absolutely wild.”

This triumph resulted in Sandfall developing a complimentary expansion for players including novel settings, enemies, along with challenging bosses, reportedly will release sometime soon.

That said, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. Our team includes a great team guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for this game plus upcoming innovations. Our goal is to maintain the close-knit size that worked for this game and do maybe major titles sequentially,” they added.

Their team size generated plenty of debate following launch. Certain industry figures, like Hideo Kojima, considered the development group as a perfect example for game development. Although the team is and was relatively lean next to major studios, checking Expedition 33’s credits shows that numerous contributors participated; the French studio contracted a Korean team to work on gameplay animations, as an instance.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more for sure if we have next an upcoming production peak in upcoming years,” they commented. “Yet I picture essentially a craft studio with a small number of exceptionally gifted creators that create collective masterpieces.” They emphasized that the studio's philosophy as a company “is more to maintain the key advantages that made this achievement possible originally.”

While it may be not the right time to reveal exact details about future projects — and trust me, efforts were made — the team does know their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, forms the foundation of our creations,” a developer said. “It's a bit too early to be able to tell our next interests, but it's important also to remain faithful to the DNA of studio with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that excites us.”

The developer mentioned that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 originated from their director “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that philosophy will be repeated in coming projects.”