Despite Massive Success, Clair Obscur Developers Aim to Keep Studio Lean

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 their publishing partner announced that this title exceeded five million copies sold, this is despite it being a day-one release on Xbox Game Pass.

Game art
Image: The Developers/The Publisher

Its success came as quite a shock for the team. “I was strongly believing that we would have a good game achieving moderate market performance,” a senior team member stated.

The CTO and lead programmer noted this title's Metacritic rating, now standing at 93, came as “maybe the biggest shock for everyone relative to our early predictions and the final result of the field was. Because when it dropped everybody in the studio was screaming and jumping. It was really frantic.”

That success prompted the studio creating new free content for the game including novel settings, foes, along with challenging bosses, which they said will release sometime soon.

Nevertheless, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. Our team includes a talented crew guided by a visionary director possessing strong ideas for this game and also for new ideas. We'd like to keep the small-team dynamic that worked for this game and do maybe large projects one by one,” they said.

The size of Sandfall sparked plenty of debate when the game came out. Some developers, including renowned designers, viewed Sandfall’s team as a perfect example for game development. Although the team is and was truly compact next to major studios, one glance at the title's staff list reveals numerous contributors worked on it; Sandfall partnered with overseas animators to work on gameplay animations, to illustrate.

“Some hiring will occur a bit more definitely if we have an increase in development in the coming years,” the producer said. “But I would see essentially a craft studio with a small number of exceptionally gifted creators that create artistic collaborations.” It was stated that the studio's philosophy as a studio “is more to maintain the key advantages that led to this accomplishment from the start.”

While it may be too early for Sandfall to say specifically about future projects — believe me, I tried to get them to — the developers understand their fundamental principles. “The turn-based aspect, forms the foundation of our creations,” a developer remarked. “It's still premature to announce what will interest us, however, it's crucial to remain faithful to our creative core through compelling worlds plus innovative play that excites us.”

The developer added that the project started with their director developing his passion title. It is hoped that philosophy we will be able to do in coming projects.”

Carla Castillo DDS
Carla Castillo DDS

An international development strategist with 15+ years of experience in sustainable policy design across Europe and Africa.