“I Think It’s Good to Have Limitations When You Are Creative” Says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Creator
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is already stacking up wins as award season ramps, but the most impressive part of its story is still the studio behind it. Sandfall Interactive is a French team widely reported to be roughly 33 developers strong, and the project itself was built on a budget under $10 million, a combination that feels almost impossible in a 2025 market where scope creep and production bloat can swallow even well funded teams.
That success has only made the scale question louder. In the final 2025 player rankings shared by the Alinea Analytics 2025 report, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 reached 8.6 million players, nearly 1 million more than Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered in the same tracking. With numbers like that, the industry default expectation is simple: hire aggressively, expand production lanes, and chase a bigger sequel pipeline.
Sandfall Interactive does not appear interested in that playbook. In an interview published via the Knowledge newsletter interview, founder, CEO, and creative director Guillaume Broche said the team has no plan to scale up, even after the game performed “100 times better” than expected. His reasoning is a direct push against the bigger studio equals better outcomes mindset. Broche argues that limitations are not a weakness, they are a creative advantage, a constraint that forces clarity, sharper decision making, and a stronger version of the studio’s identity. He also makes the human point that many teams avoid saying out loud: management expansion can pull leaders away from building games, and Sandfall would rather stay hands on and keep doing the work that made the last 5 years fulfilling.
From a business perspective, this is also a risk management decision dressed as a creative philosophy. Staying small helps preserve velocity and reduces operational drag, but it also lowers the blast radius if a follow up project does not land. The industry has plenty of cautionary tales where studios double or triple headcount after a breakout hit, then get trapped under higher burn, higher expectations, and less flexibility when the next release faces delays or misses the market. Sandfall’s choice to resist expansion could prove strategically resilient over a longer horizon.
At the same time, the studio is reinforcing goodwill through continued post launch support. Sandfall Interactive recently released a substantial free update as a thank you to the community, adding a new playable environment, new Luminas and weapons, a photo mode, and AMD FSR 4 support on PC, among other improvements.
If more studios took this approach, the industry could see fewer sprawling projects built to satisfy checklists and more focused games built around craft, coherence, and long term sustainability.
Do you want successful studios to scale up after a hit, or stay small and protect the creative identity that got them there?
