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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a top Game of the Year contender, it’s also an enormous sales triumph. Studio the development team and publisher their publishing partner announced that this title exceeded 5 million units in sales, and that’s even with its status as a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

This achievement was a surprise for the team. I firmly believed that we'd create a solid title garnering moderate market performance,” the COO and producer commented.

The CTO and lead programmer remarked that Clair Obscur’s critical score, rated 93 by critics, came as the greatest surprise” for everyone compared to what we anticipated and the final result of the field was. When the score released all staff members celebrated excitedly. It felt absolutely wild.”

This triumph has led to the studio creating a free update for the title featuring fresh areas, adversaries, along with challenging bosses, reportedly would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.

However, while the game is growing, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. “We have a great team with a strong creative director with a clear direction for the project and future concepts. We intend to preserve the close-knit size that led to our success and perhaps create one big game after another,” the producer added.

The studio's scale generated plenty of debate upon the title's release. A few well-known creators, like Hideo Kojima, looked at the development group as the “ideal” for game development. While Sandfall was and is indeed a small team versus large developers, a quick look at the game's credits indicates many individuals participated; Sandfall hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“We plan to recruit slightly more certainly if we have a future production surge in the coming years,” the executive said. “Yet I picture rather a creative atelier with a small number of highly skilled individuals that create collective masterpieces.” They emphasized that the studio's philosophy as a company “aims to keep the successful elements that enabled this success in the first place.”

While it may be not the right time to reveal exact details what’s next — rest assured, I attempted to learn more — the team does know their fundamental principles. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of our creations,” a developer explained. “It's still premature to announce future passions, however, it's crucial to adhere to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that drives our passion.”

The developer added that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 began with the visionary “work[ing] on his dream game. We aspire that philosophy we will be able to do in coming projects.”