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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY contender, but also an enormous financial hit. Studio the development team and publisher their publishing partner announced that this title exceeded 5 million units in sales, and that’s despite its status as a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

The game's performance was a surprise for the team. I firmly believed that we'd create a solid title that would meet some average market performance,” the COO and producer explained.

A technical director remarked that Clair Obscur’s critical score, rated 93 by critics, came as the greatest surprise” for everyone versus “our initial expectations and the final result of the field was. Once it was published the entire team were cheering loudly. It felt absolutely wild.”

The positive reception resulted in Sandfall developing a complimentary expansion for players with a new environment, foes, along with challenging bosses, which they said is coming sometime soon.

That said, as the title expands, don’t expect the studio to grow. We've built a great team under clear creative leadership who has a great vision for this game and future concepts. We'd like to keep the close-knit size that led to our success then develop major titles sequentially,” they said.

The size of Sandfall generated plenty of debate following launch. Some developers, including renowned designers, considered this studio as a perfect example for a studio. Although the team is and was truly compact versus large developers, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits reveals dozens of people worked on it; Sandfall partnered with overseas animators handling movement and effects, for example.

“We plan to recruit slightly more certainly if we have next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” the producer commented. “But I would see rather a creative atelier of a few exceptionally gifted creators that can make artistic collaborations.” He noted that the studio's philosophy as a studio “focuses on preserving the key advantages that enabled this success originally.”

Although it's too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details regarding upcoming titles — and trust me, efforts were made — the developers understand their essential identity. “Strategic combat, is integral to our identity of what we built,” they remarked. “The timing isn't right to announce our next interests, yet we must to remain faithful to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe plus innovative play that excites us.”

They mentioned how this game started with the visionary “work[ing] on his dream game. We aspire this approach will be repeated in coming projects.”