The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY contender, it’s also an enormous commercial success. Developer the development team and publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title exceeded five million copies sold, and that’s in spite of its status as a day-one release through the Game Pass service.
Its success came as quite an unexpected turn to the developers. I firmly believed that we'd create a good game achieving some average sales results,” a key executive explained.
The CTO and lead programmer remarked this title's critical score, rated 93 by critics, was the greatest surprise” for everyone compared to “our initial expectations and the actual outcome turned out to be. Once it was published everybody in the studio was screaming and jumping. It felt absolutely wild.”
That success has led to Sandfall developing a free update for the title with a new environment, foes, along with challenging bosses, which they said would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.
That said, as the title expands, fans shouldn't anticipate the team will expand. Our team includes an excellent group with a strong creative director with a clear direction for this game and future concepts. Our goal is to maintain the close-knit size that made this possible and perhaps create large projects one by one,” the producer noted.
The studio's scale sparked a storm of discussion following launch. Some developers, including renowned designers, viewed Sandfall’s team as the model for creative teams. Although the team is and was relatively lean versus large developers, a quick look at the title's staff list reveals many individuals participated; Sandfall hired a team in Korea for animation work, for example.
“We plan to recruit a bit more definitely should there be a future production surge in the coming years,” the producer said. “However, I envision essentially a craft studio of a few exceptionally gifted creators that can make artistic collaborations.” It was stated that their core belief as developers “aims to keep the strengths that made this achievement possible in the first place.”
Despite being too early for Sandfall to disclose concrete plans about future projects — and trust me, I tried to get them to — the team does know their essential identity. “Strategic combat, is integral to our identity of what we built,” a developer said. “The timing isn't right to specify our next interests, however, it's crucial to remain faithful to our studio's essence featuring rich storytelling and the interesting gameplay that inspires the team.”
They mentioned how this game began with the creative director “work[ing] on his dream game. It is hoped that philosophy we will be able to do in coming projects.”
