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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just an impressive GOTY candidate, but also a massive financial hit. Developer Sandfall Interactive along with publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title topped five million copies in sales, and that’s even with its status as a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success came as a shock to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we'd create a good game that would meet reasonable sales results,” a senior team member commented.

Another leading developer remarked that Clair Obscur’s critical score, rated 93 by critics, came as the greatest surprise” to the team compared to “our initial expectations and the final result of the field was. Once it was published all staff members celebrated excitedly. It was really frantic.”

This triumph resulted in work on new free content for the game featuring fresh areas, adversaries, plus epic encounters, reportedly would be out sometime soon.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. We've built an excellent group with a strong creative director who has a great vision for our work and future concepts. Our goal is to maintain the human scale that led to our success then develop large projects one by one,” the executive noted.

Their team size drummed up plenty of debate when the game came out. Some developers, including renowned designers, looked at this studio as the model for a studio. Although the team is and was relatively lean versus large developers, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits indicates many individuals were involved; the French studio partnered with overseas animators handling movement and effects, as an instance.

“We will hire a little more for sure when facing next an upcoming production peak in upcoming years,” they said. “However, I envision more of a workshop comprising a handful highly skilled individuals capable of producing collective masterpieces.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as developers “is more to maintain the strengths that led to this accomplishment in the first place.”

Despite being not the right time to say specifically about future projects — and trust me, I tried to get them to — the developers understand what’s at its core. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of our creations,” the lead programmer said. “The timing isn't right to announce what will interest us, but it's important also to adhere to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe plus innovative play that inspires the team.”

The lead programmer noted that the project originated from the creative director developing his passion title. And hopefully that philosophy will be repeated with upcoming games.”