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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a strong GOTY contender, it’s also a huge financial hit. Studio the development team and publisher their publishing partner announced that this title topped five million copies in sales, and that’s in spite of its status as a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success came as quite a surprise for the team. I firmly believed that we'd create a good game garnering moderate sales results,” a senior team member explained.

A technical director pointed out that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, which currently sits at 93, was the most surprising moment to the team versus what we anticipated and the actual outcome of the field was. When the score released the entire team celebrated excitedly. It felt absolutely wild.”

This triumph resulted in the studio creating new free content for the title including novel settings, enemies, along with challenging bosses, as announced will release in the next few months.

Nevertheless, as the title expands, it's unlikely the team will expand. “We have a great team guided by a visionary director who has a great vision for our work plus upcoming innovations. We intend to preserve the close-knit size that led to our success and perhaps create one big game after another,” the executive said.

The studio's scale sparked plenty of debate when the game came out. Some developers, including renowned designers, considered this studio as a perfect example for game development. Although the team is and was indeed a small team versus large developers, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits shows that many individuals participated; Sandfall partnered with overseas animators for animation work, for example.

“We will hire slightly more certainly if we have a future production surge in upcoming years,” the producer commented. “But I would see more of a workshop with a small number of exceptionally gifted creators that create collective masterpieces.” He noted that the studio's philosophy as a studio “is more to maintain the strengths that enabled this success in the first place.”

Despite being too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details about future projects — and trust me, efforts were made — the team does know their fundamental principles. “The turn-based aspect, forms the foundation of our creations,” a developer said. “It's a bit too early to be able to tell future passions, however, it's crucial to adhere to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe plus innovative play that excites us.”

The lead programmer added that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 began with the creative director developing his passion title. We aspire this approach we can continue as well for future productions.”