Sandfall Interactive is this year’s underdog success story: a small debut studio that created 2025’s biggest RPG hit, with a team of just over 30 full-time developers (with the help of contractors).Clair Obscur: Expedition 33bucked a recent industry trend of triple-A games taking several years of development with hundreds of people working on them.
If the normal machinations of capitalism were to play out, Sandfall would expand rapidly, lose the magic combination that made Clair Obscur special, release a failed project and then lay off the developers they hired a few years prior. Thankfully, chief technical officer and lead programmer Tom Guillermin has a more sensible approach.
In an interview withAutomaton, Guillermin opened up about Sandfall’s plans (or lack thereof) for expansion.
Double-A Development Could Be The Future
“I think it’s better to have a [small team] for now,” Guillermin said. “The ideal size of the team is… I don’t know (laughs) but if I’m going to make a full-price turn-based RPG again, [the current team size] is just as good as it is now.”
Studio head and creative director Guillaume Broche believes that stories like Sandfall’s will become more common as costs bloat in the triple-A industry.
“I believe that producing double-A games like ours will [become more common because of] bloating costs,” Broche explained. “Thanks to Unreal Engine 5, the scale of resources needed to scale production have become easier to understand, making it possible to develop interesting games efficiently even with a relatively small number of people. The Alters is a good example.”
The Alters is a survival, resource-management game developed by 11-Bit Studios. It was released in June.
Broche then touched upon western players' aversion to turn-based, Japanese-style RPGs.
“Japanese turn-based RPGs were very popular until the Xbox 360, but the prejudice [against turn-based RPGs] was born around the time open-world games became popular,” Broche explained. “Turn-based RPGs like Persona are selling well, but there is a feeling that this prejudice hasn’t left yet.”
He goes on to say that a parry system wasn’t included to appease turn-based detractors, but rather because he had been inspired by Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice while developing a precursor project to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is currently available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.
