In spite of Runaway Achievement, Expedition 33 Creators Plan to Maintain Team Compact

The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive GOTY contender, but also an enormous sales triumph. Developer the development team along with publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title surpassed five million copies sold, and that’s even with it being a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

Its success was a shock to the developers. “I was strongly believing that we would have a solid title achieving moderate sales results,” a key executive explained.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, which currently sits at 93, came as the most surprising moment to the team relative to our early predictions and the actual outcome turned out to be. Once it was published all staff members was screaming and jumping. It was really frantic.”

The positive reception resulted in the studio creating a free update for the game with a new environment, adversaries, along with challenging bosses, reportedly would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.

That said, as the title expands, don’t expect the studio to grow. We've built a great team with a strong creative director possessing strong ideas for our work and also for new ideas. Our goal is to maintain the human scale that made this possible and perhaps create large projects one by one,” the executive said.

Their team size sparked plenty of debate upon the title's release. Certain industry figures, like Hideo Kojima, viewed the development group as a perfect example for creative teams. While Sandfall was and is relatively lean versus large developers, a quick look at the title's staff list reveals many individuals participated; Sandfall partnered with overseas animators handling movement and effects, for example.

“We will hire a little more certainly if we have next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” they commented. “However, I envision rather a creative atelier of a few exceptionally gifted creators that create collective masterpieces.” It was stated that the studio's philosophy as a company “aims to keep the strengths that enabled this success originally.”

Despite being premature for the studio to say specifically what’s next — 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. “The timing isn't right to announce our next interests, but it's important also to stay true to the DNA of studio featuring rich storytelling and engaging mechanics that inspires the team.”

The developer mentioned that the project started with the visionary developing his passion title. We aspire that philosophy will be repeated as well for future productions.”