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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY contender, it’s also an enormous sales triumph. Studio the development team along with publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that this title surpassed 5 million units sold, and that’s in spite of it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance came as a shock for the team. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a solid title achieving reasonable sales results,” the COO and producer explained.

Another leading developer pointed out the game's critical score, now standing at 93, came as the most surprising moment to the team relative to what we anticipated and what the reality proved to be. When the score released everybody in the studio were cheering loudly. It felt absolutely wild.”

The positive reception prompted the studio creating a complimentary expansion for players including novel settings, foes, along with challenging bosses, as announced would be out sometime soon.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, fans shouldn't anticipate they'll hire extensively. “We have a talented crew under clear creative leadership possessing strong ideas for our work and future concepts. We'd like to keep the human scale that led to our success then develop one big game after another,” they said.

The studio's scale sparked a storm of discussion following launch. A few well-known creators, including renowned designers, looked at Sandfall’s team as the model for creative teams. Despite being relatively lean versus large developers, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits indicates numerous contributors participated; Sandfall contracted a Korean team to work on gameplay animations, as an instance.

“We plan to recruit slightly more definitely if we have next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” the executive stated. “Yet I picture rather a creative atelier with a small number of exceptionally gifted creators that can make collective masterpieces.” They emphasized that the studio's philosophy as a company “focuses on preserving the strengths that led to this accomplishment from the start.”

Despite being too early for Sandfall to say specifically about future projects — rest assured, I attempted to learn more — the team does know what’s at its core. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of our creations,” they remarked. “It's a bit too early to specify what will interest us, however, it's crucial to remain faithful to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

The developer added how this game originated from the visionary “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that's something we will be able to do with upcoming games.”