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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY candidate, it’s also a massive sales triumph. Developer Sandfall Interactive along with publisher their publishing partner revealed that the game surpassed five million copies in sales, and that’s even with its status as a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

The game's performance came as quite a shock to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we'd create an enjoyable experience achieving moderate market performance,” a key executive explained.

The CTO and lead programmer remarked that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, which currently sits at 93, came as perhaps the most surprising moment to the team relative to “our initial expectations and what the reality proved to be. Because when it dropped the entire team were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

That success prompted work on a free update for the game including novel settings, enemies, along with challenging bosses, as announced is coming within the “upcoming month[s]”.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, it's unlikely they'll hire extensively. “We have a talented crew under clear creative leadership possessing strong ideas for this game and future concepts. Our goal is to maintain the human scale that worked for this game and perhaps create large projects one by one,” the executive noted.

The studio's scale sparked significant conversation when the game came out. Some developers, such as the famed director, viewed the development group as the model for game development. Despite being relatively lean compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at the title's staff list shows that dozens of people worked on it; the French studio partnered with overseas animators to work on gameplay animations, as an instance.

“We will hire slightly more certainly when facing next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” the producer said. “However, I envision essentially a craft studio of a few highly skilled individuals that can make artistic collaborations.” It was stated that their core belief as a studio “is more to maintain the key advantages that made this achievement possible from the start.”

Although it's too early for Sandfall to disclose concrete plans about future projects — and trust me, efforts were made — the team does know their essential identity. “Strategic combat, forms the foundation of what we built,” the lead programmer said. “It's still premature to specify what will interest us, yet we must to remain faithful to our studio's essence featuring rich storytelling and engaging mechanics that excites us.”

The developer added how this game started with their director pursuing his ideal project. We aspire that philosophy will be repeated in coming projects.”