🔗 Share this article

The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just an impressive GOTY candidate, but also an enormous financial hit. Developer the development team and publisher Kepler Interactive announced that the game topped 5 million units in sales, this is in spite of its status as a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance came as quite a surprise for the team. I firmly believed that we would have a solid title garnering moderate sales results,” a key executive commented.

A technical director noted this title's review aggregate, rated 93 by critics, came as the greatest surprise” for everyone relative to what we anticipated and the final result proved to be. When the score released the entire team celebrated excitedly. It was really frantic.”

That success prompted work on new free content for the game featuring fresh areas, foes, and boss fights, which they said will release within the “upcoming month[s]”.

Nevertheless, while the game is growing, fans shouldn't anticipate the studio to grow. Our team includes a talented crew under clear creative leadership possessing strong ideas for the project plus upcoming innovations. Our goal is to maintain the close-knit size that worked for this game and perhaps create large projects one by one,” they said.

The size of Sandfall sparked significant conversation when the game came out. Certain industry figures, including renowned designers, considered this studio as a perfect example for creative teams. Despite being indeed a small team versus large developers, checking the game's credits indicates numerous contributors worked on it; Sandfall hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, to illustrate.

“We will hire a little more certainly if we have next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” they said. “Yet I picture more of a workshop of a few highly skilled individuals capable of producing collective masterpieces.” It was stated that the studio's philosophy as developers “aims to keep the strengths that led to this accomplishment from the start.”

Although it's too early for Sandfall to say specifically regarding upcoming titles — and trust me, I attempted to learn more — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of our creations,” a developer said. “The timing isn't right to specify our next interests, yet we must to stay true to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe plus innovative play that excites us.”

They mentioned that the project started with the visionary pursuing his ideal project. And hopefully that philosophy we will be able to do with upcoming games.”