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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a top Game of the Year candidate, it’s also an enormous commercial success. Studio Sandfall Interactive and publisher Kepler Interactive announced that the game surpassed 5 million units in sales, and that’s in spite of its status as a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

This achievement came as an unexpected turn to the developers. I firmly believed that we would have an enjoyable experience that would meet some average market performance,” a senior team member stated.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out this title's Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, came as the most surprising moment for everyone versus “our initial expectations and the actual outcome of the field was. Once it was published the entire team were cheering loudly. It was really frantic.”

The positive reception prompted Sandfall developing a free update for the game with a new environment, enemies, and boss fights, as announced would be out sometime soon.

That said, while the game is growing, don’t expect the studio to grow. We've built a talented crew with a strong creative director who has a great vision for this game and future concepts. Our goal is to maintain the human scale that led to our success and do maybe major titles sequentially,” they added.

The studio's scale generated plenty of debate upon the title's release. A few well-known creators, including renowned designers, looked at this studio as the model for a studio. Despite being truly compact versus large developers, checking the title's staff list reveals dozens of people worked on it; the French studio partnered with overseas animators for animation work, to illustrate.

“We will hire a bit more certainly should there be an increase in development in upcoming years,” the executive commented. “However, I envision more of a workshop comprising a handful highly skilled individuals capable of producing artistic collaborations.” They emphasized that their core belief as developers “aims to keep the successful elements that made this achievement possible from the start.”

Despite being not the right time to say specifically about future projects — rest assured, I attempted to learn more — the team does know their essential identity. “Turn-based gameplay, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” the lead programmer said. “It's still premature to announce our next interests, however, it's crucial to adhere to our studio's essence featuring rich storytelling plus innovative play that excites us.”

They mentioned that the project originated from their director “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that philosophy will be repeated as well for future productions.”