Despite Runaway Achievement, Clair Obscur Creators Aim to Maintain Studio Small

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just a top Game of the Year contender, it’s also an enormous financial hit. Studio the development team along with publisher their publishing partner revealed that the game surpassed five million copies sold, this is despite it being a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

Its success came as quite a surprise to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a good game achieving some average commercial success,” a senior team member explained.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out this title's review aggregate, now standing at 93, came as “maybe the biggest shock to the team compared to “our initial expectations and the actual outcome of the field was. When the score released all staff members celebrated excitedly. It was really frantic.”

The positive reception has led to work on a free update for the game including novel settings, foes, and boss fights, as announced would be out sometime soon.

However, as the title expands, fans shouldn't anticipate the studio to grow. We've built a great team guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for our work and also for new ideas. We intend to preserve the human scale that worked for this game and perhaps create major titles sequentially,” the producer added.

The studio's scale drummed up a storm of discussion upon the title's release. Some developers, such as the famed director, considered this studio as the model for game development. While Sandfall was and is indeed a small team versus large developers, checking the game's credits indicates many individuals worked on it; the French studio hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“We will hire a bit more definitely should there be next an upcoming production peak in upcoming years,” they stated. “But I would see more of a workshop comprising a handful exceptionally gifted creators that can make collective masterpieces.” It was stated that their core belief as a company “focuses on preserving the strengths that made this achievement possible from the start.”

While it may be premature for the studio to disclose concrete plans regarding upcoming titles — rest assured, I attempted to learn more — the developers understand what’s at its core. “Strategic combat, is integral to our identity of what we built,” a developer said. “It's still premature to specify what will interest us, yet we must to adhere to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that inspires the team.”

The developer mentioned how this game originated from their director “work[ing] on his dream game. We aspire that's something we can continue with upcoming games.”