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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just an impressive GOTY contender, it’s also a massive commercial success. Studio Sandfall Interactive and publisher their publishing partner disclosed that the game exceeded five million copies in sales, and that’s in spite of its status as a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

This achievement was a surprise to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we would have a good game that would meet moderate sales results,” a senior team member explained.

A technical director remarked that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, was the most surprising moment to the studio versus what we anticipated and what the reality proved to be. Once it was published everybody in the studio was screaming and jumping. The energy was electric.”

This triumph resulted in work on a complimentary expansion for the title including novel settings, adversaries, plus epic encounters, reportedly will release sometime soon.

That said, as the title expands, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. We've built a great team with a strong creative director possessing strong ideas for the project plus upcoming innovations. We'd like to keep the human scale that led to our success then develop major titles sequentially,” the executive added.

The studio's scale sparked plenty of debate following launch. Some developers, such as the famed director, looked at Sandfall’s team as a perfect example for a studio. While Sandfall was and is truly compact compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at the title's staff list indicates many individuals were involved; the French studio hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“We plan to recruit slightly more certainly if we have next an upcoming production peak in upcoming years,” they said. “However, I envision rather a creative atelier comprising a handful highly skilled individuals capable of producing collective masterpieces.” They emphasized that the studio's philosophy as a studio “aims to keep the strengths that enabled this success from the start.”

Despite being not the right time to reveal exact details about future projects — believe me, efforts were made — they are certain their essential identity. “Strategic combat, forms the foundation of this project,” the lead programmer said. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell future passions, but it's important also to stay true to our creative core featuring rich storytelling plus innovative play that excites us.”

The lead programmer added how this game started with their director “work[ing] on his dream game. We aspire that philosophy we can continue in coming projects.”