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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 Sandfall Interactive and publisher Kepler Interactive announced that the game exceeded five million copies sold, this is despite it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success was an unexpected turn for the team. I firmly believed that we'd create a good game achieving reasonable market performance,” a key executive stated.

The CTO and lead programmer remarked this title's review aggregate, rated 93 by critics, came as the most surprising moment to the studio compared to what we anticipated and the actual outcome proved to be. Once it was published everybody in the studio was screaming and jumping. It was really frantic.”

The positive reception resulted in the studio creating a free update for the game featuring fresh areas, adversaries, along with challenging bosses, which they said will release in the next few months.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, fans shouldn't anticipate the team will expand. “We have an excellent group under clear creative leadership who has a great vision for this game and future concepts. We'd like to keep the close-knit size that made this possible and do maybe large projects one by one,” they added.

Their team size drummed up a storm of discussion when the game came out. Certain industry figures, like Hideo Kojima, viewed the development group as the model for game development. Despite being relatively lean compared to its AAA counterparts, a quick look at Expedition 33’s credits shows that dozens of people participated; the French studio partnered with overseas animators to work on gameplay animations, to illustrate.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more definitely if we have an increase in development down the line,” the producer said. “However, I envision rather a creative atelier comprising a handful exceptionally gifted creators that can make artistic collaborations.” They emphasized that Sandfall’s vision as developers “focuses on preserving the key advantages that made this achievement possible in the first place.”

Despite being not the right time to say specifically regarding upcoming titles — believe me, I tried to get them to — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” a developer said. “It's still premature to be able to tell future passions, however, it's crucial to adhere to our studio's essence featuring rich storytelling and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

They mentioned that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 started with the visionary pursuing his ideal project. It is hoped this approach we will be able to do in coming projects.”