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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY contender, it’s also a huge financial hit. Developer Sandfall Interactive and publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that the game surpassed 5 million units in sales, this is even with it being a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

Its success came as a surprise to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we'd create an enjoyable experience achieving reasonable market performance,” the COO and producer stated.

The CTO and lead programmer noted that Clair Obscur’s review aggregate, rated 93 by critics, was the greatest surprise” to the team relative to what we anticipated and the final result proved to be. When the score released all staff members was screaming and jumping. It was really frantic.”

The positive reception resulted in the studio creating new free content for the title including novel settings, adversaries, plus epic encounters, as announced would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, it's unlikely the studio to grow. “We have a talented crew with a strong creative director who has a great vision for the project plus upcoming innovations. We'd like to keep the human scale that made this possible and do maybe one big game after another,” the executive said.

The studio's scale sparked significant conversation following launch. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, looked at this studio as the “ideal” for creative teams. Despite being truly compact versus large developers, a quick look at Expedition 33’s credits reveals dozens of people worked on it; Sandfall hired a team in Korea for animation work, to illustrate.

“We plan to recruit a bit more for sure should there be an increase in development in the coming years,” the executive commented. “But I would see more of a workshop of a few highly skilled individuals capable of producing collective masterpieces.” He noted that their core belief as a studio “is more to maintain the strengths that made this achievement possible originally.”

Although it's too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details what’s next — rest assured, I attempted to learn more — they are certain their essential identity. “Strategic combat, is integral to our identity of what we built,” the lead programmer said. “It's still premature to be able to tell what will interest us, however, it's crucial to remain faithful to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

The lead programmer noted that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 began with the visionary developing his passion title. And hopefully that philosophy we will be able to do in coming projects.”