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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive GOTY candidate, but also a huge sales triumph. Developer the development team and publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that this title exceeded five million copies sold, and that’s even with its status as a day-one release 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 good game that would meet moderate commercial success,” a key executive commented.

The CTO and lead programmer noted that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, was “maybe the biggest shock to the studio relative to our early predictions and the final result of the field was. When the score released all staff members was screaming and jumping. The energy was electric.”

That success has led to work on a complimentary expansion for players with a new environment, adversaries, plus epic encounters, as announced will release sometime soon.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. We've built an excellent group with a strong creative director who has a great vision for this game and also for new ideas. We'd like to keep the small-team dynamic that worked for this game then develop large projects one by one,” the producer said.

The size of Sandfall sparked significant conversation upon the title's release. Certain industry figures, like Hideo Kojima, viewed Sandfall’s team as the “ideal” for creative teams. Although the team is and was indeed a small team next to major studios, a quick look at Expedition 33’s credits reveals dozens of people participated; Sandfall contracted a Korean team for animation work, to illustrate.

“We plan to recruit a little more definitely when facing an increase in development in the coming years,” the executive commented. “Yet I picture essentially a craft studio with a small number of exceptionally gifted creators capable of producing artistic collaborations.” They emphasized that their core belief as developers “is more to maintain the strengths that made this achievement possible from the start.”

While it may be premature for the studio to say specifically about future projects — and trust me, I tried to get them to — they are certain their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, I think it's in the DNA of our creations,” they explained. “The timing isn't right to announce future passions, but it's important also to stay true to our studio's essence featuring rich storytelling plus innovative play that excites us.”

They mentioned that the project started with the creative director developing his passion title. We aspire that philosophy we will be able to do as well for future productions.”