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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only an impressive Game of the Year candidate, it’s also a huge financial hit. Studio the development team along with publisher Kepler Interactive revealed that the game exceeded five million copies in sales, and that’s in spite of its status as a launch-day addition on Xbox Game Pass.

This achievement was a shock to the developers. I firmly believed that we'd create an enjoyable experience garnering moderate market performance,” the COO and producer commented.

A technical director pointed out the game's review aggregate, now standing at 93, came as the most surprising moment to the studio relative to our early predictions and the actual outcome of the field was. When the score released everybody in the studio were cheering loudly. It was really frantic.”

This triumph resulted in work on a free update for players featuring fresh areas, enemies, along with challenging bosses, as announced will release sometime soon.

However, despite the game's evolution, don’t expect they'll hire extensively. We've built an excellent group under clear creative leadership possessing strong ideas for our work plus upcoming innovations. Our goal is to maintain the close-knit size that made this possible then develop large projects one by one,” the producer noted.

Their team size sparked a storm of discussion when the game came out. Some developers, including renowned designers, viewed this studio as a perfect example for game development. Although the team is and was indeed a small team compared to its AAA counterparts, a quick look at Expedition 33’s credits shows that numerous contributors worked on it; the French studio partnered with overseas animators for animation work, to illustrate.

“Some hiring will occur slightly more definitely when facing an increase in development in the coming years,” the producer stated. “But I would see essentially a craft studio with a small number of really talented people capable of producing collective masterpieces.” They emphasized that their core belief as a studio “aims to keep the successful elements that enabled this success in the first place.”

Although it's premature for the studio to disclose concrete plans regarding upcoming titles — rest assured, I tried to get them to — the developers understand what’s at its core. “The turn-based aspect, forms the foundation of our creations,” a developer explained. “It's a bit too early to be able to tell what will interest us, however, it's crucial to remain faithful to our studio's essence featuring rich storytelling and engaging mechanics that drives our passion.”

They noted how this game started with their director developing his passion title. And hopefully this approach will be repeated in coming projects.”