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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive GOTY candidate, but also a massive commercial success. Developer the development team along with publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that the game topped 5 million units sold, this is even with it being a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance came as a surprise to the developers. “I was strongly believing that we would have a solid title achieving reasonable sales results,” a key executive stated.

The CTO and lead programmer noted the game's critical score, rated 93 by critics, came as perhaps the most surprising moment to the studio relative to what we anticipated and the actual outcome proved to be. When the score released everybody in the studio celebrated excitedly. The energy was electric.”

The positive reception resulted in work on new free content for the title with a new environment, enemies, and boss fights, which they said will release sometime soon.

That said, while the game is growing, don’t expect the studio to grow. Our team includes a talented crew with a strong creative director with a clear direction for our work plus upcoming innovations. We'd like to keep the human scale that made this possible and do maybe large projects one by one,” they added.

The size of Sandfall sparked significant conversation upon the title's release. A few well-known creators, like Hideo Kojima, considered the development group as a perfect example for creative teams. Despite being relatively lean compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at the title's staff list shows that many individuals were involved; Sandfall hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, as an instance.

“We plan to recruit a little more definitely if we have a future production surge in the coming years,” the producer commented. “However, I envision more of a workshop of a few highly skilled individuals that create collective masterpieces.” They emphasized that their core belief as developers “aims to keep the strengths that enabled this success originally.”

While it may be not the right time to disclose concrete plans what’s next — believe me, I attempted to learn more — the team does know their essential identity. “Strategic combat, forms the foundation of this project,” a developer explained. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell our next interests, yet we must to remain faithful to our studio's essence with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that drives our passion.”

The lead programmer added that the project originated from the visionary developing his passion title. We aspire this approach will be repeated as well for future productions.”