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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just an impressive GOTY candidate, it’s also an enormous commercial success. Developer the development team along with publisher their publishing partner revealed that the game surpassed 5 million units in sales, this is despite its status as a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success was a shock to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we'd create an enjoyable experience garnering reasonable market performance,” a senior team member commented.

Another leading developer remarked this title's review aggregate, rated 93 by critics, came as “maybe the biggest shock to the studio relative to our early predictions and the actual outcome proved to be. Because when it dropped all staff members were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

That success has led to the studio creating new free content for players with a new environment, enemies, along with challenging bosses, reportedly will release within the “upcoming month[s]”.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect the team will expand. Our team includes a talented crew guided by a visionary director who has a great vision for our work plus upcoming innovations. Our goal is to maintain the human scale that worked for this game then develop major titles sequentially,” the producer noted.

The size of Sandfall sparked plenty of debate following launch. Some developers, such as the famed director, viewed this studio as a perfect example for game development. Despite being indeed a small team next to major studios, checking the title's staff list reveals many individuals participated; the French studio hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“We plan to recruit a little more certainly should there be a future production surge in upcoming years,” the producer stated. “Yet I picture essentially a craft studio comprising a handful highly skilled individuals capable of producing artistic collaborations.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as developers “is more to maintain the key advantages that led to this accomplishment originally.”

Despite being premature for the studio to say specifically regarding upcoming titles — and trust me, efforts were made — the team does know their fundamental principles. “The turn-based aspect, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” a developer said. “It's still premature to be able to tell future passions, but it's important also to adhere to the DNA of studio with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that excites us.”

They mentioned how this game started with their director “work[ing] on his dream game. It is hoped that philosophy we can continue in coming projects.”