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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive Game of the Year candidate, it’s also a huge commercial success. Developer Sandfall Interactive and publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that this title surpassed 5 million units in sales, and that’s despite its status as a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

This achievement came as quite a shock to the developers. “I was strongly believing that we would have a solid title garnering reasonable market performance,” a senior team member stated.

Another leading developer pointed out the game's Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, came as perhaps the most surprising moment to the team versus our early predictions and the final result turned out to be. Because when it dropped the entire team celebrated excitedly. It was really frantic.”

That success has led to work on a complimentary expansion for the title featuring fresh areas, enemies, and boss fights, which they said would be out sometime soon.

However, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect the team will expand. Our team includes an excellent group under clear creative leadership who has a great vision for the project and future concepts. We'd like to keep the small-team dynamic that made this possible and perhaps create major titles sequentially,” they added.

The studio's scale sparked plenty of debate upon the title's release. Some developers, including renowned designers, looked at this studio as the “ideal” for creative teams. Although the team is and was indeed a small team next to major studios, checking the game's credits reveals many individuals were involved; the French studio contracted a Korean team for animation work, for example.

“We plan to recruit a little more definitely should there be next an upcoming production peak down the line,” the executive commented. “Yet I picture rather a creative atelier comprising a handful exceptionally gifted creators that create artistic collaborations.” They emphasized that Sandfall’s vision as developers “aims to keep the strengths that made this achievement possible in the first place.”

While it may be too early for Sandfall to disclose concrete plans about future projects — and trust me, efforts were made — they are certain their fundamental principles. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of our creations,” they remarked. “It's a bit too early to specify our next interests, yet we must to adhere to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

The developer noted that the project originated from the visionary pursuing his ideal project. We aspire that's something we will be able to do as well for future productions.”