In spite of Runaway Success, Expedition 33 Developers Aim to Keep Studio Compact
The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a top GOTY candidate, it’s also a huge commercial success. Studio the development team and publisher Kepler Interactive announced that the game topped 5 million units sold, this is in spite of its status as a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.
The game's performance came as a surprise to Sandfall. “I was strongly believing that we would have an enjoyable experience garnering reasonable commercial success,” the COO and producer commented.
The CTO and lead programmer remarked that Clair Obscur’s review aggregate, which currently sits at 93, came as perhaps the most surprising moment to the studio compared to our early predictions and the actual outcome turned out to be. When the score released all staff members were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”
This triumph prompted the studio creating new free content for the game including novel settings, adversaries, plus epic encounters, reportedly is coming in the next few months.
However, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect the studio to grow. Our team includes an excellent group with a strong creative director possessing strong ideas for the project and also for new ideas. Our goal is to maintain the close-knit size that made this possible and perhaps create one big game after another,” they added.
Their team size sparked plenty of debate following launch. A few well-known creators, such as the famed director, viewed this studio as a perfect example for game development. While Sandfall was and is indeed a small team next to major studios, a quick look at the title's staff list shows that dozens of people participated; the French studio hired a team in Korea for animation work, as an instance.
“We will hire slightly more definitely should there be a future production surge in the coming years,” the executive stated. “Yet I picture rather a creative atelier of a few highly skilled individuals that can make artistic collaborations.” It was stated that their core belief as a studio “aims to keep the key advantages that led to this accomplishment originally.”
Although it's too early for Sandfall to reveal exact details what’s next — believe me, I attempted to learn more — the team does know their fundamental principles. “Turn-based gameplay, is integral to our identity of what we built,” the lead programmer remarked. “It's still premature to specify what will interest us, yet we must to adhere to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe plus innovative play that drives our passion.”
The lead programmer added that the project began with the visionary developing his passion title. We aspire that's something will be repeated in coming projects.”