Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a Game of the Year contender, it’s a massive commercial success. Developer Sandfall Interactive and publisher Kepler Interactive announced Wednesday that the game topped 5 million units in sales, and that’s in spite of it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.
Its success came as something of a surprise to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we would have a good game that would meet some average commercial success,” COO and producer Francois Meurisse told Polygon during a video interview.
CTO and lead programmer Tom Guillermin noted Clair Obscur’s Metacritic rating, which currently sits at 93, came as “maybe the biggest shock” to the team compared to “our initial expectations and what the reality of the field was. Because when it dropped everybody in the studio was screaming and jumping. It was really frantic.”
That success has led to Sandfall developing a free update for the game with a new environment, enemies, and boss fights, which Meurisse said would be out within the “upcoming month[s].” However, while the game is growing, don’t expect the studio to grow.
“We have a great team with a strong creative director [Guillaume Broche] who has a great vision for this game and also for new ideas. We’d like to keep the human scale that worked for this game and do maybe one big game after another,” Meurisse said.
The size of Sandfall drummed up a storm of discussion when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, looked at Sandfall’s team as the “ideal” for a studio. While Sandfall was and is indeed a small team compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at Expedition 33’s credits shows that dozens of people worked on it; the French studio hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, for example.
“We will hire a bit more for sure if we have next an upcoming production peak in upcoming years,” Meurisse said. “But I would see more of a workshop of a few really talented people that can make a work of art together.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as a studio “is more to maintain the strengths that made this achievement possible in the first place.”
While it may be too early for Sandfall to say specifically what’s next — and trust me, I tried to get them to — the team does know what’s at its core. “The turn-based aspect, I think it’s in the DNA of what we built,” Guillermin said. “It’s a bit too early 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 and the interesting gameplay that excites us.”
Guillermin noted Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 started with Broche “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that’s something we will be able to do as well for future productions.”
