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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a top GOTY contender, but also an enormous commercial success. Studio the development team and publisher their publishing partner announced that this title topped five million copies sold, and that’s in spite of its status as a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance came as quite a surprise to the developers. I was convinced that we would have a good game that would meet reasonable market performance,” the COO and producer explained.

Another leading developer noted that Clair Obscur’s critical score, rated 93 by critics, came as the most surprising moment to the studio relative to what we anticipated and what the reality turned out to be. When the score released the entire team celebrated excitedly. The energy was electric.”

This triumph resulted in Sandfall developing new free content for the title with a new environment, foes, along with challenging bosses, which they said would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.

However, while the game is growing, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. We've built a great team guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for this game and future concepts. Our goal is to maintain the close-knit size that led to our success and perhaps create large projects one by one,” they noted.

The studio's scale sparked significant conversation upon the title's release. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, considered the development group as a perfect example for creative teams. While Sandfall was and is relatively lean compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits reveals numerous contributors worked on it; the French studio hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, to illustrate.

“Some hiring will occur a little more definitely when facing an increase in development in the coming years,” they commented. “However, I envision more of a workshop of a few highly skilled individuals that create artistic collaborations.” He noted that their core belief as developers “is more to maintain the key advantages that enabled this success from the start.”

Although it's too early for Sandfall to disclose concrete plans regarding upcoming titles — and trust me, efforts were made — the team does know their essential identity. “The turn-based aspect, I think it's in the DNA of this project,” they said. “It's still premature to be able to tell our next interests, yet we must to stay true to the DNA of studio through compelling worlds and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

The developer mentioned that the project began with the creative director developing his passion title. And hopefully that's something will be repeated as well for future productions.”