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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong Game of the Year contender, it’s also a huge financial hit. Developer Sandfall Interactive along with publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that this title exceeded 5 million units in sales, and that’s in spite of it being a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

The game's performance was a shock to the developers. I was convinced that we'd create a solid title achieving reasonable market performance,” a key executive stated.

A technical director noted this title's critical score, rated 93 by critics, came as “maybe the biggest shock for everyone compared to what we anticipated and what the reality of the field was. When the score released the entire team celebrated excitedly. It was really frantic.”

The positive reception has led to work on new free content for the game with a new environment, adversaries, plus epic encounters, as announced will release in the next few months.

That said, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. “We have an excellent group under clear creative leadership possessing strong ideas for the project plus upcoming innovations. Our goal is to maintain the human scale that worked for this game and do maybe one big game after another,” the producer noted.

The studio's scale drummed up a storm of discussion when the game came out. A few well-known creators, such as the famed director, viewed the development group as the model for creative teams. Despite being relatively lean versus large developers, a quick look at the title's staff list shows that numerous contributors participated; Sandfall partnered with overseas animators for animation work, for example.

“We will hire a little more definitely should there be an increase in development down the line,” they commented. “Yet I picture rather a creative atelier comprising a handful highly skilled individuals that can make a work of art together.” It was stated that the studio's philosophy as a company “focuses on preserving the key advantages that enabled this success originally.”

Despite being too early for Sandfall to disclose concrete plans 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,” the lead programmer explained. “It's still premature to be able to tell what will interest us, but it's important also to adhere to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that inspires the team.”

The developer noted how this game started with the creative director developing his passion title. It is hoped that philosophy we can continue in coming projects.”