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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a top GOTY contender, but also an enormous financial hit. Studio the development team and publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title exceeded 5 million units sold, and that’s in spite of its status as a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

Its success was an unexpected turn to the developers. I firmly believed that we'd create a good game garnering reasonable market performance,” a senior team member commented.

A technical director remarked the game's review aggregate, now standing at 93, came as perhaps the most surprising moment to the team compared to what we anticipated and the final result proved to be. When the score released everybody in the studio were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

This triumph resulted in Sandfall developing new free content for the game including novel settings, adversaries, plus epic encounters, which they said is coming within the “upcoming month[s]”.

That said, despite the game's evolution, it's unlikely the studio to grow. We've built a great team with a strong creative director with a clear direction for this game plus upcoming innovations. We intend to preserve the close-knit size that made this possible and perhaps create major titles sequentially,” they added.

Their team size sparked a storm of discussion upon the title's release. A few well-known creators, including renowned designers, looked at this studio as the “ideal” for a studio. Despite being truly compact next to major studios, checking Expedition 33’s credits shows that dozens of people worked on it; the French studio partnered with overseas animators handling movement and effects, as an instance.

“We will hire a bit more certainly if we have an increase in development down the line,” the producer stated. “However, I envision more of a workshop of a few exceptionally gifted creators that create artistic collaborations.” They emphasized that their core belief as a company “aims to keep the successful elements that led to this accomplishment originally.”

Despite being too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details what’s next — and trust me, I tried to get them to — the team does know their essential identity. “Turn-based gameplay, forms the foundation of our creations,” they said. “The timing isn't right to announce our next interests, however, it's crucial to stay true to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

The lead programmer mentioned that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 originated from their director developing his passion title. We aspire this approach we will be able to do as well for future productions.”