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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top Game of the Year candidate, it’s also an enormous financial hit. Studio Sandfall Interactive along with publisher their publishing partner disclosed that the game topped five million copies in sales, this is even with its status as a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

Its success came as quite a surprise for the team. I firmly believed that we would have a good game that would meet reasonable commercial success,” the COO and producer explained.

A technical director pointed out the game's Metacritic rating, which currently sits at 93, came as “maybe the biggest shock to the team relative to our early predictions and the final result proved to be. Once it was published the entire team celebrated excitedly. It was really frantic.”

The positive reception resulted in work on a free update for the game including novel settings, foes, and boss fights, which they said is coming within the “upcoming month[s]”.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. “We have an excellent group guided by a visionary director with a clear direction for our work and also for new ideas. We intend to preserve the human scale that worked for this game and do maybe one big game after another,” the producer added.

Their team size generated plenty of debate upon the title's release. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, considered this studio as a perfect example for a studio. While Sandfall was and is relatively lean versus large developers, a quick look at the game's credits reveals many individuals were involved; the French studio contracted a Korean team to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more definitely should there be a future production surge in upcoming years,” the producer stated. “But I would see essentially a craft studio of a few highly skilled individuals capable of producing artistic collaborations.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as developers “aims to keep the strengths that enabled this success from the start.”

Although it's premature for the studio to disclose concrete plans what’s next — rest assured, I attempted to learn more — the developers understand their essential identity. “Turn-based gameplay, I think it's in the DNA of our creations,” a developer remarked. “The timing isn't right to specify our next interests, yet we must to stay true to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that excites us.”

The developer added that the project began with their director developing his passion title. And hopefully that's something will be repeated with upcoming games.”