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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY candidate, but also a massive financial hit. Studio the development team along with publisher their publishing partner revealed that this title topped five million copies in sales, this is even with it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

Its success came as quite a shock to the developers. “I was strongly believing that we would have a solid title garnering moderate sales results,” a key executive stated.

Another leading developer pointed out this title's Metacritic rating, now standing at 93, came as “maybe the biggest shock to the team relative to “our initial expectations and what the reality proved to be. Once it was published the entire team celebrated excitedly. It was really frantic.”

That success has led to Sandfall developing a complimentary expansion for players with a new environment, adversaries, along with challenging bosses, which they said is coming within the “upcoming month[s]”.

Nevertheless, as the title expands, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. We've built a great team under clear creative leadership who has a great vision for our work and future concepts. We intend to preserve the human scale that worked for this game and perhaps create large projects one by one,” the executive said.

The studio's scale sparked plenty of debate following launch. A few well-known creators, like Hideo Kojima, considered Sandfall’s team as the model for game development. Despite being truly compact versus large developers, checking the game's credits shows that numerous contributors were involved; Sandfall contracted a Korean team for animation work, to illustrate.

“We plan to recruit a little more certainly if we have an increase in development down the line,” the producer stated. “Yet I picture 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 “aims to keep the strengths that led to this accomplishment originally.”

Despite being premature for the studio to disclose concrete plans regarding upcoming titles — rest assured, I attempted to learn more — the team does know their fundamental principles. “Strategic combat, forms the foundation of this project,” the lead programmer remarked. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell what will interest us, but it's important also to stay true to the DNA of studio with [a] strong narrative universe plus innovative play that drives our passion.”

The developer mentioned that the project started with their director “work[ing] on his dream game. It is hoped that's something we will be able to do with upcoming games.”