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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top Game of the Year candidate, it’s also a huge financial hit. Developer Sandfall Interactive and publisher their publishing partner announced that the game surpassed five million copies in sales, this is even with it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance came as quite an unexpected turn to the developers. I was convinced that we would have a solid title achieving reasonable commercial success,” the COO and producer explained.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out this title's critical score, rated 93 by critics, came as perhaps the most surprising moment for everyone versus what we anticipated and the actual outcome turned out to be. When the score released all staff members celebrated excitedly. It was really frantic.”

That success resulted in work on new free content for players with a new environment, adversaries, plus epic encounters, which they said will release sometime soon.

That said, as the title expands, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. We've built a great team under clear creative leadership who has a great vision for the project and future concepts. We'd like to keep the close-knit size that made this possible then develop major titles sequentially,” the producer said.

The size of Sandfall sparked plenty of debate upon the title's release. A few well-known creators, including renowned designers, looked at Sandfall’s team as the model for a studio. Although the team is and was indeed a small team versus large developers, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits indicates numerous contributors were involved; the French studio partnered with overseas animators for animation work, for example.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more certainly if we have a future production surge in the coming years,” the executive commented. “But I would see more of a workshop with a small number of highly skilled individuals capable of producing collective masterpieces.” It was stated that their core belief as developers “focuses on preserving the successful elements that led to this accomplishment in the first place.”

Despite being too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details regarding upcoming titles — and trust me, I tried to get them to — the team does know their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of what we built,” a developer explained. “It's still premature to announce future passions, yet we must to remain faithful to our studio's essence through compelling worlds and the interesting gameplay that inspires the team.”

The lead programmer noted how this game began with the creative director developing his passion title. We aspire this approach we will be able to do as well for future productions.”