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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive Game of the Year contender, but also a huge commercial success. Studio the development team along with publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that this title surpassed 5 million units in sales, and that’s in spite of its status as a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

This achievement came as an unexpected turn to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we would have a solid title garnering reasonable market performance,” a senior team member stated.

A technical director noted this title's Metacritic rating, now standing at 93, was the most surprising moment for everyone relative to what we anticipated and the actual outcome turned out to be. When the score released the entire team were cheering loudly. It was really frantic.”

That success resulted in work on new free content for the title with a new environment, adversaries, and boss fights, which they said would be out in the next few months.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect the team will expand. “We have a talented crew guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for our work plus upcoming innovations. We'd like to keep the close-knit size that led to our success and do maybe large projects one by one,” they said.

The studio's scale sparked significant conversation when the game came out. A few well-known creators, like Hideo Kojima, considered the development group as the model for creative teams. While Sandfall was and is truly compact next to major studios, checking the title's staff list indicates numerous contributors were involved; the French studio partnered with overseas animators for animation work, as an instance.

“We plan to recruit slightly more certainly if we have an increase in development in upcoming years,” the executive commented. “Yet I picture rather a creative atelier with a small number of highly skilled individuals that create collective masterpieces.” It was stated that Sandfall’s vision as a company “aims to keep the key advantages that made this achievement possible originally.”

While it may be not the right time to say specifically regarding upcoming titles — rest assured, efforts were made — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of what we built,” a developer said. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell future passions, however, it's crucial to adhere to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

They noted that the project originated from the visionary “work[ing] on his dream game. We aspire that philosophy will be repeated in coming projects.”