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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY contender, but also an enormous commercial success. Studio Sandfall Interactive and publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that this title topped five million copies sold, this is in spite of it being a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

This achievement was an unexpected turn to the developers. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a good game garnering some average market performance,” a senior team member commented.

A technical director remarked this title's review aggregate, rated 93 by critics, came as “maybe the biggest shock to the studio versus “our initial expectations and the actual outcome of the field was. Because when it dropped all staff members were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

That success prompted work on new free content for the game featuring fresh areas, adversaries, along with challenging bosses, which they said would be out sometime soon.

That said, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect the team will expand. We've built an excellent group guided by a visionary director who has a great vision for this game and future concepts. We'd like to keep the human scale that worked for this game and do maybe major titles sequentially,” the executive added.

The size of Sandfall drummed up plenty of debate when the game came out. A few well-known creators, like Hideo Kojima, looked at this studio as the model for creative teams. While Sandfall was and is truly compact versus large developers, one glance at the title's staff list shows that dozens of people participated; the French studio partnered with overseas animators to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“We plan to recruit slightly more definitely should there be an increase in development down the line,” the executive stated. “Yet I picture rather a creative atelier comprising a handful highly skilled individuals capable of producing collective masterpieces.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as a studio “focuses on preserving the successful elements that made this achievement possible originally.”

Despite being too early for Sandfall to disclose concrete plans what’s next — believe me, efforts were made — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Strategic combat, is integral to our identity of this project,” a developer explained. “It's a bit too early to announce future passions, however, it's crucial to adhere to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that excites us.”

The developer noted that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 began with the creative director “work[ing] on his dream game. It is hoped that's something we will be able to do with upcoming games.”