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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just an impressive Game of the Year contender, but also an enormous sales triumph. Developer Sandfall Interactive and publisher their publishing partner disclosed that this title surpassed five million copies in sales, and that’s in spite of it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

This achievement was a shock for the team. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a solid title achieving reasonable sales results,” a key executive explained.

A technical director remarked that Clair Obscur’s review aggregate, now standing at 93, came as “maybe the biggest shock for everyone compared to our early predictions and the actual outcome proved to be. Once it was published the entire team were cheering loudly. It felt absolutely wild.”

This triumph resulted in the studio creating a complimentary expansion for the title with a new environment, enemies, and boss fights, reportedly would be out within the “upcoming month[s]”.

However, while the game is growing, it's unlikely the team will expand. Our team includes a talented crew with a strong creative director possessing strong ideas for our work and also for new ideas. We intend to preserve the close-knit size that made this possible and do maybe large projects one by one,” the executive noted.

The size of Sandfall drummed up plenty of debate upon the title's release. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, viewed Sandfall’s team as the model for creative teams. While Sandfall was and is relatively lean compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at the game's credits reveals many individuals worked on it; Sandfall hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, as an instance.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more definitely if we have next an upcoming production peak in the coming years,” they said. “But I would see essentially a craft studio comprising a handful highly skilled individuals capable of producing a work of art together.” He noted that the studio's philosophy as a company “is more to maintain the successful elements that made this achievement possible in the first place.”

Although it's premature for the studio to disclose concrete plans what’s next — and trust me, efforts were made — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “Strategic combat, I think it's in the DNA of this project,” a developer said. “It's still premature to be able to tell our next interests, yet we must to adhere to the DNA of studio featuring rich storytelling and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

The lead programmer added how this game originated from the visionary “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully this approach we can continue in coming projects.”