In spite of Massive Success, Expedition 33 Creators Aim to Maintain Studio Compact

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong Game of the Year contender, but also an enormous commercial success. Studio Sandfall Interactive along with publisher their publishing partner announced that this title exceeded five million copies in sales, this is in spite of it being a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance came as quite a surprise for the team. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a solid title that would meet some average market performance,” the COO and producer stated.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out that Clair Obscur’s critical score, now standing at 93, came as perhaps the most surprising moment for everyone versus our early predictions and what the reality proved to be. When the score released the entire team was screaming and jumping. It was really frantic.”

That success has led to work on a free update for players with a new environment, foes, along with challenging bosses, which they said is coming sometime soon.

However, despite the game's evolution, fans shouldn't anticipate the team will expand. Our team includes a talented crew under clear creative leadership with a clear direction for this game and future concepts. We'd like to keep the human scale that worked for this game and do maybe one big game after another,” the producer added.

Their team size generated significant conversation when the game came out. A few well-known creators, like Hideo Kojima, considered the development group as a perfect example for creative teams. Despite being indeed a small team versus large developers, checking the title's staff list indicates numerous contributors participated; Sandfall hired a team in Korea handling movement and effects, to illustrate.

“We plan to recruit a little more definitely if we have an increase in development in the coming years,” the executive stated. “Yet I picture more of a workshop with a small number of exceptionally gifted creators that can make a work of art together.” They emphasized that the studio's philosophy as developers “is more to maintain the key advantages that enabled this success originally.”

While it may be too early for Sandfall to disclose concrete plans about future projects — rest assured, I attempted to learn more — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, forms the foundation of our creations,” the lead programmer said. “It's still premature to specify future passions, yet we must to adhere to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that inspires the team.”

The developer mentioned that the project started with their director developing his passion title. And hopefully that philosophy we will be able to do as well for future productions.”