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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top GOTY contender, it’s also an enormous commercial success. Studio the development team along with publisher their publishing partner announced that the game surpassed 5 million units in sales, this is even with its status as a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

This achievement came as quite an unexpected turn to Sandfall. I was convinced that we'd create a good game achieving reasonable market performance,” a senior team member stated.

Another leading developer pointed out the game's Metacritic rating, rated 93 by critics, was “maybe the biggest shock to the studio compared to our early predictions and the actual outcome of the field was. Because when it dropped the entire team celebrated excitedly. The energy was electric.”

The positive reception has led to Sandfall developing a free update for players with a new environment, enemies, along with challenging bosses, as announced is coming sometime soon.

However, as the title expands, fans shouldn't anticipate they'll hire extensively. We've built a great team under clear creative leadership possessing strong ideas for the project and future concepts. We'd like to keep the human scale that led to our success and perhaps create large projects one by one,” the producer added.

Their team size generated plenty of debate following launch. Some developers, such as the famed director, viewed this studio as the “ideal” for a studio. While Sandfall was and is truly compact versus large developers, a quick look at the game's credits reveals many individuals worked on it; the French studio hired a team in Korea for animation work, to illustrate.

“We will hire slightly more definitely when facing next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” they stated. “However, I envision essentially a craft studio with a small number of really talented people that create a work of art together.” They emphasized that Sandfall’s vision as developers “aims to keep the key advantages that made this achievement possible in the first place.”

Despite being premature for the studio to say specifically regarding upcoming titles — rest assured, efforts were made — they are certain their essential identity. “Strategic combat, forms the foundation of what we built,” the lead programmer explained. “It's still premature to announce our next interests, but it's important also to adhere to the DNA of studio featuring rich storytelling and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

They noted how this game began with the creative director “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that philosophy we can continue in coming projects.”