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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a strong Game of the Year candidate, it’s also a massive financial hit. Studio the development team and publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title exceeded five million copies sold, and that’s even with its status as a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance came as a surprise to the developers. I was convinced that we would have a solid title achieving moderate market performance,” a key executive stated.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out this title's Metacritic rating, now standing at 93, came as perhaps the greatest surprise” to the team versus our early predictions and the final result turned out to be. Once it was published all staff members were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

That success resulted in the studio creating a complimentary expansion for the title with a new environment, foes, and boss fights, reportedly would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.

However, while the game is growing, don’t expect the studio to grow. “We have a talented crew with a strong creative director with a clear direction for our work plus upcoming innovations. We intend to preserve the human scale that made this possible then develop major titles sequentially,” the executive said.

The size of Sandfall generated a storm of discussion following launch. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, viewed Sandfall’s team as the model for a studio. Despite being truly compact compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits shows that dozens of people participated; Sandfall hired a team in Korea handling movement and effects, for example.

“We will hire a little more definitely when facing an increase in development in the coming years,” they said. “Yet I picture more of a workshop comprising a handful really talented people capable of producing artistic collaborations.” He noted that their core belief as a company “aims to keep the key advantages that enabled this success originally.”

While it may be too early for Sandfall to say specifically about future projects — and trust me, I tried to get them to — the team does know their essential identity. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” the lead programmer explained. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell future passions, but it's important also to adhere to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe plus innovative play that drives our passion.”

They added that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 began with the visionary developing his passion title. And hopefully that's something we will be able to do with upcoming games.”