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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY candidate, it’s also a huge sales triumph. Developer the development team along with publisher their publishing partner announced that this title topped 5 million units sold, and that’s despite it being a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance was a shock to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we would have an enjoyable experience achieving some average market performance,” a key executive commented.

The CTO and lead programmer remarked that Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, which currently sits at 93, came as perhaps “maybe the biggest shock for everyone relative to our early predictions and the final result turned out to be. Once it was published everybody in the studio was screaming and jumping. It was really frantic.”

This triumph resulted in the studio creating new free content for the title including novel settings, enemies, along with challenging bosses, as announced will release sometime soon.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, fans shouldn't anticipate the team will expand. We've built a great team guided by a visionary director with a clear direction for the project and future concepts. We intend to preserve the small-team dynamic that worked for this game then develop one big game after another,” they said.

The studio's scale drummed up plenty of debate when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, looked at this studio as a perfect example for game development. Although the team is and was indeed a small team compared to its AAA counterparts, checking the game's credits shows that many individuals participated; Sandfall hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, as an instance.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more definitely should there be an increase in development in the coming years,” the producer stated. “However, I envision essentially a craft studio with a small number of really talented people capable of producing a work of art together.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as a studio “aims to keep the strengths that led to this accomplishment from the start.”

Although it's too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details about future projects — rest assured, efforts were made — the team does know what’s at its core. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” they said. “It's a bit too early to be able to tell what will interest us, yet we must to remain faithful to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe plus innovative play that inspires the team.”

They mentioned that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 began with the creative director “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that's something will be repeated in coming projects.”