Despite Overwhelming Success, Clair Obscur Creators Aim to Maintain Team Lean

The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top GOTY contender, but also a massive sales triumph. Developer the development team along with publisher their publishing partner disclosed that this title exceeded five million copies sold, and that’s in spite of it being a launch-day addition through the Game Pass service.

Its success was a shock to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we would have a solid title achieving reasonable sales results,” a senior team member commented.

A technical director remarked the game's Metacritic rating, now standing at 93, came as the most surprising moment for everyone relative to our early predictions and what the reality of the field was. Because when it dropped everybody in the studio celebrated excitedly. It felt absolutely wild.”

The positive reception resulted in the studio creating a complimentary expansion for the title including novel settings, enemies, and boss fights, which they said would be out sometime soon.

That said, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. We've built a great team under clear creative leadership with a clear direction for our work and future concepts. We'd like to keep the human scale that made this possible then develop one big game after another,” the executive noted.

Their team size sparked significant conversation upon the title's release. Certain industry figures, including renowned designers, looked at the development group as the “ideal” for a studio. Despite being truly compact versus large developers, checking Expedition 33’s credits indicates dozens of people worked on it; Sandfall partnered with overseas animators to work on gameplay animations, as an instance.

“We will hire a little more for sure should there be an increase in development down the line,” they said. “But I would see essentially a craft studio of a few highly skilled individuals capable of producing a work of art together.” He noted that their core belief as a company “aims to keep the strengths that led to this accomplishment from the start.”

While it may be too early for Sandfall to say specifically what’s next — and trust me, I attempted to learn more — they are certain their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of what we built,” they said. “It's still premature to specify future passions, however, it's crucial to remain faithful to our studio's essence through compelling worlds and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

The developer noted that the project started with their director “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully this approach we can continue with upcoming games.”