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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a top GOTY candidate, it’s also an enormous commercial success. Studio Sandfall Interactive along with publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title surpassed five million copies in sales, and that’s despite it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success came as quite an unexpected turn to the developers. I was convinced that we would have a good game garnering moderate sales results,” the COO and producer commented.

Another leading developer noted this title's Metacritic rating, which currently sits at 93, came as “maybe the biggest shock to the studio compared to our early predictions and the actual outcome turned out to be. Once it was published everybody in the studio were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

This triumph prompted the studio creating a complimentary expansion for players featuring fresh areas, enemies, and boss fights, as announced would be out sometime soon.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, fans shouldn't anticipate they'll hire extensively. Our team includes an excellent group under clear creative leadership with a clear direction for our work and also for new ideas. We intend to preserve the close-knit size that led to our success and perhaps create large projects one by one,” the executive said.

Their team size sparked a storm of discussion following launch. A few well-known creators, like Hideo Kojima, viewed this studio as the model for a studio. Despite being relatively lean next to major studios, checking Expedition 33’s credits indicates dozens of people worked on it; Sandfall contracted a Korean team handling movement and effects, for example.

“We will hire a bit more definitely if we have an increase in development in the coming years,” they stated. “But I would see rather a creative atelier with a small number of highly skilled individuals that create a work of art together.” It was stated that the studio's philosophy as a company “is more to maintain the strengths that made this achievement possible originally.”

Despite being premature for the studio to say specifically regarding upcoming titles — rest assured, I tried to get them to — the team does know their fundamental principles. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of this project,” they explained. “It's a bit too early to announce what will interest us, but it's important also to remain faithful to our creative core featuring rich storytelling and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

The developer added that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 originated from their director developing his passion title. We aspire this approach will be repeated in coming projects.”