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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY candidate, it’s also a huge sales triumph. Developer the development team and publisher their publishing partner revealed that the game topped five million copies in sales, and that’s in spite of it being a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance was a surprise to the developers. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a good game achieving some average commercial success,” the COO and producer stated.

The CTO and lead programmer remarked this title's critical score, rated 93 by critics, came as “maybe the biggest shock to the team relative to “our initial expectations and the actual outcome proved to be. Once it was published everybody in the studio was screaming and jumping. It felt absolutely wild.”

This triumph resulted in Sandfall developing new free content for the title with a new environment, adversaries, plus epic encounters, which they said is coming in the next few months.

Nevertheless, as the title expands, fans shouldn't anticipate the team will expand. Our team includes a great team with a strong creative director with a clear direction for the project and also for new ideas. We'd like to keep the small-team dynamic that led to our success and perhaps create major titles sequentially,” the producer added.

Their team size drummed up a storm of discussion when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, viewed Sandfall’s team as a perfect example for game development. Despite being truly compact next to major studios, checking the game's credits indicates many individuals worked on it; Sandfall partnered with overseas animators handling movement and effects, as an instance.

“We plan to recruit slightly more certainly when facing a future production surge in the coming years,” the executive said. “Yet I picture more of a workshop with a small number of highly skilled individuals that create collective masterpieces.” It was stated that the studio's philosophy as a studio “is more to maintain the successful elements that made this achievement possible in the first place.”

Despite being not the right time to disclose concrete plans regarding upcoming titles — believe me, I attempted to learn more — they are certain their essential identity. “The turn-based aspect, forms the foundation of our creations,” they said. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell what will interest us, yet we must to remain faithful to the DNA of studio featuring rich storytelling and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

The developer mentioned that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 started with the visionary “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that's something will be repeated with upcoming games.”