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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just an impressive Game of the Year candidate, but also an enormous commercial success. Developer the development team and publisher their publishing partner announced that this title surpassed five million copies in sales, and that’s in spite of its status as a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

The game's performance came as a shock to the developers. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a good game achieving reasonable commercial success,” the COO and producer commented.

Another leading developer pointed out this title's critical score, which currently sits at 93, was the greatest surprise” for everyone versus what we anticipated and the actual outcome turned out to be. Once it was published the entire team celebrated excitedly. It felt absolutely wild.”

The positive reception resulted in Sandfall developing a free update for players featuring fresh areas, enemies, plus epic encounters, which they said is coming within the “upcoming month[s]”.

That said, while the game is growing, don’t expect the studio to grow. Our team includes a great team under clear creative leadership possessing strong ideas for our work plus upcoming innovations. We intend to preserve the small-team dynamic that led to our success and perhaps create major titles sequentially,” they added.

The size of Sandfall sparked significant conversation when the game came out. Certain industry figures, like Hideo Kojima, looked at the development group as the model for a studio. Although the team is and was truly compact compared to its AAA counterparts, a quick look at the title's staff list indicates numerous contributors worked on it; the French studio contracted a Korean team for animation work, to illustrate.

“We will hire slightly more certainly when facing an increase in development in the coming years,” the executive said. “But I would see essentially a craft studio of a few highly skilled individuals that can make artistic collaborations.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as developers “aims to keep the successful elements that enabled this success originally.”

Although it's premature for the studio to disclose concrete plans about future projects — believe me, I attempted to learn more — the team does know their essential identity. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of what we built,” they remarked. “It's still premature to announce what will interest us, but it's important also to stay true to the DNA of studio featuring rich storytelling and the interesting gameplay that excites us.”

The developer added that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 originated from the visionary pursuing his ideal project. And hopefully that philosophy will be repeated as well for future productions.”