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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just an impressive GOTY candidate, but also a massive commercial success. Developer Sandfall Interactive and publisher their publishing partner disclosed that the game surpassed 5 million units sold, and that’s even with it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

This achievement came as quite a surprise to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we'd create an enjoyable experience achieving reasonable market performance,” the COO and producer stated.

Another leading developer remarked the game's review aggregate, now standing at 93, came as the greatest surprise” for everyone versus our early predictions and what the reality of the field was. Once it was published everybody in the studio were cheering loudly. It felt absolutely wild.”

This triumph prompted Sandfall developing new free content for players with a new environment, foes, along with challenging bosses, as announced would be out in the next few months.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, fans shouldn't anticipate they'll hire extensively. “We have a talented crew under clear creative leadership possessing strong ideas for our work plus upcoming innovations. We intend to preserve the close-knit size that worked for this game and perhaps create large projects one by one,” the producer said.

The size of Sandfall generated a storm of discussion when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, looked at this studio as the “ideal” for a studio. Despite being relatively lean versus large developers, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits reveals numerous contributors were involved; the French studio contracted a Korean team to work on gameplay animations, to illustrate.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more for sure should there be next an upcoming production peak in upcoming years,” the producer said. “Yet I picture essentially a craft studio comprising a handful highly skilled individuals that create a work of art together.” He noted that the studio's philosophy as a studio “focuses on preserving the strengths that made this achievement possible from the start.”

Although it's too early for Sandfall to say specifically about future projects — and trust me, I tried to get them to — the team does know what’s at its core. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of what we built,” a developer said. “It's still premature to specify future passions, but it's important also to stay true to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that inspires the team.”

The lead programmer mentioned how this game originated from their director “work[ing] on his dream game. We aspire that philosophy we can continue as well for future productions.”