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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn't just an impressive GOTY candidate, but also an enormous financial hit. Developer the development team and publisher their publishing partner disclosed that this title surpassed five million copies sold, and that’s in spite of its status as a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

The game's performance came as an unexpected turn to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we'd create a solid title garnering reasonable sales results,” a senior team member stated.

Another leading developer pointed out that Clair Obscur’s review aggregate, which currently sits at 93, was the most surprising moment to the studio compared to our early predictions and the final result of the field was. Once it was published all staff members was screaming and jumping. It was really frantic.”

That success resulted in the studio creating a free update for players including novel settings, enemies, and boss fights, reportedly will release sometime soon.

That said, as the title expands, it's unlikely the studio to grow. “We have an excellent group guided by a visionary director who has a great vision for the project plus upcoming innovations. Our goal is to maintain the close-knit size that made this possible and perhaps create major titles sequentially,” the producer said.

Their team size sparked plenty of debate when the game came out. Certain industry figures, including renowned designers, viewed Sandfall’s team as the model for a studio. While Sandfall was and is indeed a small team compared to its AAA counterparts, one glance at the title's staff list shows that dozens of people participated; the French studio hired a team in Korea to work on gameplay animations, for example.

“We plan to recruit slightly more definitely should there be a future production surge in upcoming years,” they said. “However, I envision rather a creative atelier comprising a handful really talented people that can make collective masterpieces.” He noted that their core belief as developers “is more to maintain the strengths that led to this accomplishment originally.”

While it may be too early for Sandfall to disclose concrete plans what’s next — and trust me, I attempted to learn more — the team does know their essential identity. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of this project,” a developer explained. “It's still premature to be able to tell what will interest us, however, it's crucial to remain faithful to the DNA of studio through compelling worlds plus innovative play that excites us.”

The developer added how this game originated from the creative director “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully this approach we will be able to do in coming projects.”