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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive Game of the Year contender, it’s also an enormous sales triumph. Studio the development team and publisher Kepler Interactive announced that this title surpassed 5 million units in sales, and that’s even with it being a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

This achievement came as quite an unexpected turn to the developers. I was convinced that we'd create a solid title achieving reasonable commercial success,” a senior team member explained.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out this title's critical score, rated 93 by critics, came as the most surprising moment to the studio compared to our early predictions and the actual outcome turned out to be. When the score released the entire team celebrated excitedly. The energy was electric.”

That success has led to work on a free update for the title including novel settings, enemies, and boss fights, as announced will release sometime soon.

However, as the title expands, don’t expect the team will expand. Our team includes a talented crew guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for our work and future concepts. Our goal is to maintain the small-team dynamic that made this possible and do maybe one big game after another,” the executive noted.

The studio's scale sparked a storm of discussion following launch. Certain industry figures, such as the famed director, viewed Sandfall’s team as a perfect example for game development. While Sandfall was and is relatively lean compared to its AAA counterparts, a quick look at the game's credits reveals numerous contributors participated; the French studio hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“We will hire a bit more definitely when facing an increase in development in the coming years,” the executive said. “However, I envision rather a creative atelier with a small number of really talented people that can make collective masterpieces.” It was stated that their core belief as developers “aims to keep the strengths that led to this accomplishment originally.”

While it may be too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details about future projects — rest assured, I attempted to learn more — they are certain their essential identity. “The turn-based aspect, I think it's in the DNA of our creations,” they said. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell future passions, however, it's crucial to stay true to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that inspires the team.”

The developer mentioned that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 started with the creative director “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that's something we will be able to do in coming projects.”