“Just 33 Team Members and a Dog” remains ideal team size for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developers

Breakout Turn-based RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s French Studio Sandfall Interactive currently has no plans to scale its team despite the game’s staggering success within the video game industry. The game, released in April, managed to ship 3.3 million units by May 2025, as officially confirmed by the studio on its official X account. This doesn’t account for a sizeable amount of players using Xbox’s Game Pass subscription service, however.

In an interview with Automation, Chief Technology Officer and Lead Programmer Tom Guillermin elaborated on the studio’s monumental success and what makes the team tick, “ I think that, for now, I’d prefer working as a small team. I’m not sure how big an ideal team would be, but when it comes to making a full-price turn-based RPG, I believe the team we have now is just the right size.”

The lean scale of their operation resonated with the CEO and Creative Director of the studio, Guillaume Broche. According to the CEO, the smaller the studio, the greater the efficiency. In his own words:

“We had five people working on environments, two on the story. I think around three to six people worked on the cinematics. The music was done by four people.” All-in-all, the in-house team comprised 30 to 40 members, while external partners handled QA, marketing, and localization. The credits, however, indicate that hundreds of roles like animation and performance capture had been outsourced.

A small in-house team with outsourced roles is a hybrid model that allowed Sandfall to punch well above its weight, delivering a now critically acclaimed modern turn-based RPG that even received praise from video game luminaries, including the likes of Hideo Kojima. According to Death Stranding 2: On the Beach’s director, “They only have like 33 team members and a dog. That’s my ideal when I create something with a team.”

However, Broche stated that the team’s success is due to their rigorous hiring process, which prioritized raw talent over prior seasonal experience. In the interview, Broche further commented, “We conducted over 200 interviews in order to gather the first team members.”

To realize how new the team was to the industry, the studio’s VFX artist and character designer were fresh college graduates. Moreover, the game’s beautiful soundtrack was developed by a talented artist, Lorien Testard, who was cherry-picked from SoundCloud by Sandfall.

Broche further commented, “Since they had very little experience working, they also didn’t have many existing notions of what work was supposed to be like, which I think is a good thing, because they managed to adapt to our peculiar work style.”

Sandfall's success in an industry gunning for efficiency and massive budgets, with sprawling teams, speaks volumes. For now, Sandfall keeps its ambitions high despite the low headcount. That just goes to show that a tight-knit crew, or a small but passionate studio, can shake up the games industry with the right direction and vision.