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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a top Game of the Year contender, it’s also a huge sales triumph. Studio the development team and publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title exceeded 5 million units sold, and that’s even with it being a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

Its success came as quite a surprise to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we'd create an enjoyable experience achieving reasonable sales results,” the COO and producer commented.

The CTO and lead programmer remarked the game's critical score, which currently sits at 93, came as perhaps “maybe the biggest shock to the studio relative to what we anticipated and the final result of the field was. Once it was published everybody in the studio was screaming and jumping. It felt absolutely wild.”

That success resulted in Sandfall developing a complimentary expansion for the title with a new environment, enemies, along with challenging bosses, which they said would be out sometime soon.

However, as the title expands, fans shouldn't anticipate they'll hire extensively. Our team includes an excellent group with a strong creative director who has a great vision for our work and future concepts. We'd like to keep the human scale that led to our success then develop major titles sequentially,” they said.

The studio's scale sparked significant conversation when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, looked at Sandfall’s team as the model for game development. While Sandfall was and is truly compact versus large developers, checking the game's credits shows that numerous contributors worked on it; Sandfall partnered with overseas animators to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“We plan to recruit a bit more definitely when facing an increase in development in the coming years,” the producer commented. “But I would see more of a workshop comprising a handful really talented people that can make collective masterpieces.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as developers “is more to maintain the successful elements that enabled this success originally.”

Despite being premature for the studio to disclose concrete plans about future projects — believe me, efforts were made — they are certain their essential identity. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of our creations,” the lead programmer said. “It's still premature to be able to tell future passions, yet we must to stay true to the DNA of studio with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that inspires the team.”

The developer added that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 originated from the visionary pursuing his ideal project. It is hoped that philosophy will be repeated in coming projects.”