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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top Game of the Year contender, it’s also a huge commercial success. Studio Sandfall Interactive and publisher Kepler Interactive disclosed that this title surpassed 5 million units in sales, this is in spite of it being a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success was a surprise for the team. “I was strongly believing that we would have an enjoyable experience achieving reasonable market performance,” a key executive explained.

The CTO and lead programmer remarked that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, came as the greatest surprise” to the team relative to our early predictions and the actual outcome turned out to be. Once it was published the entire team was screaming and jumping. The energy was electric.”

That success prompted work on a complimentary expansion for players featuring fresh areas, foes, along with challenging bosses, reportedly is coming in the next few months.

That said, while the game is growing, it's unlikely they'll hire extensively. Our team includes a great team guided by a visionary director who has a great vision for this game and future concepts. We'd like to keep the close-knit size that worked for this game and perhaps create large projects one by one,” the producer said.

The studio's scale sparked plenty of debate when the game came out. Some developers, including renowned designers, looked at Sandfall’s team as the model for game development. Despite being truly compact compared to its AAA counterparts, a quick look at Expedition 33’s credits reveals numerous contributors were involved; Sandfall hired a team in Korea for animation work, as an instance.

“We will hire slightly more definitely if we have a future production surge down the line,” the producer stated. “Yet I picture more of a workshop of a few highly skilled individuals that create artistic collaborations.” They emphasized that Sandfall’s vision as a company “focuses on preserving the successful elements that enabled this success originally.”

Despite being too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details regarding upcoming titles — and trust me, efforts were made — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, I think it's in the DNA of our creations,” the lead programmer remarked. “It's a bit too early to announce our next interests, but it's important also to adhere to the DNA of studio with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that excites us.”

They added that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 originated from the creative director “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully this approach we can continue as well for future productions.”