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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive Game of the Year contender, it’s also a huge commercial success. Developer the development team along with publisher their publishing partner announced that the game surpassed 5 million units in sales, and that’s in spite of it being a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

The game's performance was a surprise to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we would have a good game garnering reasonable market performance,” a senior team member stated.

A technical director remarked this title's review aggregate, rated 93 by critics, was the greatest surprise” to the studio versus our early predictions and what the reality turned out to be. Once it was published everybody in the studio celebrated excitedly. It felt absolutely wild.”

That success prompted the studio creating a free update for the game including novel settings, adversaries, and boss fights, as announced will release in the next few months.

That said, while the game is growing, don’t expect the team will expand. “We have a talented crew guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for this game plus upcoming innovations. We intend to preserve the close-knit size that led to our success and do maybe one big game after another,” the producer added.

Their team size sparked significant conversation when the game came out. A few well-known creators, such as the famed director, considered Sandfall’s team as the model for creative teams. While Sandfall was and is relatively lean versus large developers, a quick look at Expedition 33’s credits reveals dozens of people participated; Sandfall hired a team in Korea handling movement and effects, for example.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more definitely when facing next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” the executive stated. “Yet I picture essentially a craft studio of a few really talented people capable of producing a work of art together.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as developers “focuses on preserving the strengths that led to this accomplishment from the start.”

Despite being not the right time to say specifically about future projects — and trust me, I tried to get them to — the team does know their essential identity. “The turn-based aspect, I think it's in the DNA of our creations,” they said. “It's a bit too early to be able to tell our next interests, yet we must to adhere to the DNA of studio through compelling worlds and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

The developer added how this game originated from their director developing his passion title. And hopefully that philosophy will be repeated in coming projects.”