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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a strong GOTY contender, but also a massive commercial success. Studio the development team and publisher their publishing partner disclosed that this title topped five million copies in sales, this is in spite of it being a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

Its success was a surprise to Sandfall. I was convinced that we would have an enjoyable experience that would meet reasonable market performance,” a senior team member stated.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, came as perhaps the most surprising moment to the studio compared to our early predictions and what the reality turned out to be. Once it was published everybody in the studio celebrated excitedly. The energy was electric.”

This triumph resulted in the studio creating a complimentary expansion for the title including novel settings, adversaries, and boss fights, as announced would be out sometime soon.

Nevertheless, as the title expands, fans shouldn't anticipate they'll hire extensively. We've built a great team guided by a visionary director who has a great vision for this game and also for new ideas. Our goal is to maintain the human scale that led to our success and perhaps create large projects one by one,” the producer said.

The studio's scale sparked a storm of discussion when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, viewed Sandfall’s team as the model for a studio. While Sandfall was and is relatively lean versus large developers, checking Expedition 33’s credits reveals many individuals worked on it; the French studio partnered with overseas animators for animation work, to illustrate.

“We will hire a little more certainly when facing next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” they said. “However, I envision rather a creative atelier comprising a handful exceptionally gifted creators that create artistic collaborations.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as a studio “is more to maintain the successful elements that enabled this success in the first place.”

Despite being not the right time to reveal exact details what’s next — and trust me, I attempted to learn more — the team does know what’s at its core. “Strategic combat, is integral to our identity of our creations,” they said. “The timing isn't right 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 inspires the team.”

The developer mentioned that the project began with their director pursuing his ideal project. We aspire that's something we can continue as well for future productions.”