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2025 was an excellent year for videogames. We got Arc Raiders, Battlefield 6, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and of course, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a game that I in no way expected to love as much as I did. But it seems as if its success was a surprise for more than just myself, as its developers over at Sandfall reflected on its whirlwind ride (via Edge magazine issue 419).
“We conducted some mock reviews six months to one year before release, and we ended up with expected scores of around 80,” François Meurisse, co-founder, COO, and producer, said. “So our official goal towards the end of production was to reach for 85 in Metacritic, and we did some great extra work and focus in the last months to bounce the quality up. So we were hoping for that 85, but passing the 90 bar of Metacritic was really a great reward for the team. That’s where things began to get a little crazy.
“Part of my job is always ‘plan for the worst, hope for the best’, so I forbade myself from having too much hope. Much of my work is to manage expectations for the team, so the whole production was making up lots of awful scenarios of how things could go wrong. But it was worth the trouble, because we exceeded by far the best that we could have expected.”
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Expedition 33 ended up with a Metacritic score of 92 and a user score of 9.5 based on 25,495 reviews. “We were giving each other bets on the Metacritic score,” art director Nicholas Maxson-Francombe said. “I think most of us were aiming at around 80. We thought it was a pretty decent game. We were pretty proud of what we did, but even if sales [had been quite low] we would have been happy.”
But it did sell. In fact, Expedition 33 sold a lot. Shipping over one million copies in just three days, despite being on Game Pass, it was one of the most successful games we had the pleasure of playing last year.
“It was completely unexpected from pretty much everybody,” Guillaume Broche, CEO and creative director, noted. “What really surprised us the most is how much the narrative and cinematics and story resonated with people. This is the thing that’s hardest to quantify, because it’s always something very personal. So the fact that this worked so well, pretty instantly, this was thing thing where we were like, ‘Ok, this is one hundred times what we were expecting’.”
Expedition 33’s release may have been a huge success, but it didn’t make the act of letting it drift out into the public grasp any harder, at least not for Maxson-Francombe: “It was our baby for five years and as soon as it went out, it just felt like it was no longer ours.”
Sharing your art with the world can be both wonderful and scary; you never know what people will latch onto or how the narrative intention may change depending on how it’s received.
“It has a mind of its own,” Maxson-Francombe adds. “It went all over the world. Of course, we made something that we thought was cool, but the fact that it reached so many people, and having messages back from people saying, like, ‘Your art inspired me’, it was incredibly touching. But also something like getting to experience our first art book, it’s completely surreal, because I’ve devoured so many art books. It was just so strange, finally seeing everything that I’ve been making digitally come to life on paper.”
However, on reflection, Broche wouldn’t have done anything differently, attributing Expedition 33’s success partly to the strength of the studio and the devs’ perseverance in creating a game that they loved: “I think the secret is to adapt the game to the team you have, and not the other way around. And mostly, it’s not about processes, it’s making a game that you want to play. It’s contradictory, but [try to] not care too much about the players, because if you care about your game, it means you care about the players ultimately.”
