When Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 released earlier this year, no one knew how much of a hit it would be. But, it’s now a front runner for Game of the Year in many people’s eyes. The game sold one million copies over three days after launch. That number jumped to 2 million within 12 days. Now, developer Sandfall Interactive has announced a new milestone as after 33 days, 3.3 million copies of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 have been sold. As the game keeps reaching different milestones, Sandfall and publisher Kepler Interactive are talking about how the game has been so successful.

Thirty-three days ago, we released Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Since then, we’ve sold 3.3 million copies.

Seriously. As of today.
We couldn’t make that up.

Another entry on the long list of surreal moments that your support has made real. Thank you ALL.

Tomorrow comes.🤝 pic.twitter.com/OclgkZAtgP

— Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (@expedition33) May 27, 2025

One of the things that both Kepler and Sandfall Interactive agree on is that the scope of the game is a big reason for the game’s success. In this day and age where AAA takes a majority of the market share in the industry, smaller, AA games make a big impact if done correctly. “These kinds of games did exist in much greater numbers about 15 years ago,” Matt Handrahan, Kepler Interactive said in an interview with GI.biz . “And I think there are some threads that the AAA industry lost as they grew and grew and grew, and brought in different ways of monetising,” he continues.

“We have to remember there was a time when AAA companies were making games like Vanquish and Mirror’s Edge and Kane & Lynch, and all of these really cool, interesting, not small games, but much smaller scale games. And you’ve seen the number of releases from AAA publishers dwindle and dwindle and dwindle. Now there’s an opportunity for teams like Sandfall to come in and give players something that they really have not been given for quite a long time.”

One thing that Sandfall is looking to avoid after Clair Obscur’s success is scaling up the studio. They want to stay small. “For now, our vision would be to stick to a close team working in the same city with less than 50 people on board, focusing on one project after another, and keeping this agility, and this creative strength, and smartness of a small group of passionate people wanting to do something big,” Sandfall’s COO and producer François Meurisse says.

“That’s how video games were made for years,” he continues. “The team that made Ocarina of Time or Half-Life 2, I think those were max 60 or 70 people*, and that kind of size allows for good decisions and great creativity.”

Handrahan notes that game making is an iterative process so maintaining a small permanent team makes sense.

“I think keeping a core team to hold the vision and to build out what the game is, and then expanding as you need to through things like outsourcing, is a very smart and sustainable way to manage game development,” he says.

“I think that there’s been a lot of irresponsible practices in the industry,” he continues, referring to the inherent risks involved in ballooning AAA budgets and team sizes. “Some games can make it work. Grand Theft Auto 6 is going to make it work, I think we can all say with great confidence. But there are plenty of games made with very large teams and for huge amounts of money that don’t land, and there is a human cost to running things that way. People lose their jobs. God knows how many layoffs there’s been in the industry over the last few years.”

In addition to the scale and scope of the project, another thing that both Sandfall and Kepler say helped with the game’s success is its approach to quality over quantity when it came to content.

“One of the things that’s great about Expedition 33 is it really respects the player’s time,” Handrahan explains. “It gives them plenty to do, and it gives them plenty of satisfaction, but it isn’t arbitrarily 500 hours of gameplay. It’s impactful because it’s scoped correctly. […] It doesn’t have any sense of bloat or extraneous things that are put there just to make it larger and larger and larger.”

“Brevity should be more of a virtue in gaming,” he adds. “Something can be better by being shorter – something that’s being discussed in film at the moment. Every film seems to be two and a half hours long, and I think most people are like, ‘Can they all be a bit shorter, please? Because we have other things to do with our lives’.”

“From the beginning, we wanted to do an intense and short experience,” Meurisse says. “The first length estimates of the game were closer to 20 hours for the main quest. I think we ended up closer to 30, even 40 hours if you take a bit of time. As a player, there are so many great games out there that I want to experience, [and] what’s important to me is the level of excitement and fun I get from a game, rather than how long it is.”

He also questions the link between game length and price. “The value that players get from games does not align systematically with the length of the game,” he says. “For example, one of my favourite games of all time is Inside, which lasts about two hours, but it’s one of the most polished, and intense [experiences] – and even life changing for some people.”

Another factor that led to the game’s big launch is the $50/$45 price point.

“I think as that AAA price goes up, I think it creates more of an opportunity to be launching games – more sensibly scoped games – [and] pricing them at that $40–50 range,” says Handrahan. “And I don’t think anyone that played Expedition 33 would think they didn’t get their money’s worth out of that.”

“When we announced the pricing at $50 we did actually have a little of a backlash online,” adds Meurisse, “with people fearing it would be a 12-hour-long game with unfinished content, and that it was suspicious to have a $50 game that was looking like this in the trailers. But in the end we stuck with the price, we doubled down on it, [and] we provided some context about the fact that it wasn’t a AAA.”

“In the end, it was a win-win situation, because it was a way to attract more players towards the game, to have good player satisfaction about their buying [decision], and it could actually end up doing more sales. So maybe players’ perception can change a bit about that kind of price [point].”