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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive GOTY candidate, it’s also a huge commercial success. Studio the development team along with publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that the game surpassed 5 million units in sales, this is despite its status as a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success came as quite a shock to the developers. I firmly believed that we would have a solid title that would meet moderate sales results,” the COO and producer stated.

The CTO and lead programmer noted that Clair Obscur’s critical score, which currently sits at 93, came as perhaps the most surprising moment for everyone compared to “our initial expectations and the actual outcome proved to be. Because when it dropped the entire team celebrated excitedly. It was really frantic.”

The positive reception has led to work on new free content for the title including novel settings, foes, along with challenging bosses, reportedly will release in the next few months.

That said, while the game is growing, fans shouldn't anticipate the studio to grow. We've built a great team with a strong creative director possessing strong ideas for our work plus upcoming innovations. We'd like to keep the small-team dynamic that worked for this game and do maybe large projects one by one,” they said.

The size of Sandfall drummed up plenty of debate following launch. A few well-known creators, like Hideo Kojima, considered this studio as a perfect example for creative teams. While Sandfall was and is indeed a small team compared to its AAA counterparts, checking the title's staff list indicates dozens of people were involved; Sandfall hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, as an instance.

“We plan to recruit a little more definitely should there be next an upcoming production peak down the line,” the producer stated. “Yet I picture more of a workshop of a few really talented people that can make artistic collaborations.” It was stated that their core belief as developers “focuses on preserving the strengths that made this achievement possible originally.”

Despite being not the right time to disclose concrete plans regarding upcoming titles — believe me, I tried to get them to — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” the lead programmer remarked. “It's still premature to specify what will interest us, but it's important also to remain faithful to our studio's essence featuring rich storytelling and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

The lead programmer mentioned how this game originated from their director developing his passion title. We aspire this approach we can continue with upcoming games.”