Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — a 30-person team's debut RPG sells 3.3M in 33 days

In 2020 Guillaume Broche was a Ubisoft contractor in Montpellier with an idea for a game in the style of the Final Fantasy titles he grew up on. The genre consensus said no: turn-based Japanese RPGs were a niche publishers had walked away from, and a high-fidelity one supposedly required the hundreds of staff and nine-figure budgets of a AAA production. Broche posted casting calls on Reddit for a demo, quit, and founded Sandfall Interactive with two colleagues.

Prove the neglected high-fidelity turn-based JRPG can be rebuilt by a small core team — junior hires, Unreal 5, outsourced animation, big-name voices.

After publisher Kepler Interactive came aboard in 2023, the core team settled at about 30 people, deliberately heavy on junior talent. Staff were found by evidence of skill, not CVs: composer Lorien Testard had never scored a game before Broche found his track on SoundCloud; lead writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen answered a Reddit voice-acting post; art director Nicholas Maxson-Francombe was recruited off ArtStation. Unreal Engine 5's Nanite and Lumen carried the visuals while the team focused on 'hero assets', gameplay animation was outsourced to an eight-person Korean team, QLOC handled QA, and Kepler's backing paid for star voices including Charlie Cox and Andy Serkis. The game itself married turn-based party combat with Sekiro-style real-time dodges and parries, set in a Belle Époque France where a painted figure kills everyone aged 33 each year.

It sold 500,000 copies in 24 hours, 1 million in 3 days, and 3.3 million in 33 days — with day-one Game Pass downloads counted nowhere in those figures — and hit a 145,000 peak on Steam. It became one of 2025's highest-rated releases, then took nine awards from a record thirteen nominations at The Game Awards 2025, including Game of the Year — the first French title to win it, as President Macron announced with pride. The film rights were optioned by Story Kitchen before the game even shipped.

Sandfall Interactive began as a passion project: in 2020, at the height of Covid, Ubisoft contractor Guillaume Broche recruited a demo team through Reddit casting calls, quit, and founded the studio in Montpellier with François Meurisse and Tom Guillermin. None of it followed the industry's hiring script. The composer, Lorien Testard, had never worked on a video game; Broche found him through tracks posted on SoundCloud. The lead writer, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, was a voice actor who answered Broche's Reddit post and wrote her way into the job. The art director came from an ArtStation portfolio.

After Kepler Interactive's 2023 investment, the core team grew to roughly 30 people — 'mostly junior people but they are so incredibly invested in the project', Broche told the BBC. The tooling carried the scale: Unreal Engine 5 for rendering, an eight-person Korean team for gameplay animation, QLOC for QA, Ebb Software for ports, and Kepler-funded voices from Charlie Cox and Andy Serkis. Rock Paper Shotgun later counted the credits: Sandfall itself is about 30, but the full roll runs far wider — dozens in localisation, QA and voice, plus a 30-plus musician soundtrack with a nine-person choir.

The bet was on a genre the AAA industry had stopped making. Broche's stated purpose was a high-fidelity turn-based RPG, a form he felt big studios had neglected; the combat layered real-time dodges and parries, borrowed from Sekiro, onto turn-based party fights, and the world was a surreal Belle Époque France — the setting reset from an earlier steampunk draft after investors told Broche to 'think bigger'.

The market's answer was emphatic. Released 24 April 2025 on PS5, Xbox and PC, it sold half a million copies in a day and 3.3 million in 33 days, none of which counts its day-one Game Pass audience. At The Game Awards 2025 it won nine of a record thirteen nominations, including Game of the Year — the first French title to do so. President Emmanuel Macron congratulated the team twice, calling it a shining example of 'French audacity and creativity'.

It picked a category with real, demonstrable demand and no AAA supply: fans had been asking for a big-budget turn-based JRPG for a decade, so a competent entrant had no direct competition.

Unreal Engine 5 did the heavy rendering work, letting a small team concentrate effort on the few 'hero assets' that define a game's look instead of spreading itself thin.

Hiring was evidence-based rather than credential-based — a SoundCloud composer and a Reddit-cast writer — which bought ferocious commitment at junior salaries.

Outsourcing was targeted at parallelizable work (animation, QA, localisation, porting) so the 30-person core never became the bottleneck for polish.

Day-one Game Pass traded short-term revenue for reach, converting a subscription audience into word-of-mouth for a game with no marketing budget to spare.

A genre called dead is usually just under-supplied. A small, invested core team plus honest outsourcing can serve a starved audience better than a bloated AAA machine.

The success became an industry talking point in both directions: held up as proof that bloated AAA production is a choice, and — as Rock Paper Shotgun argued — wrongly used to erase the outsourced animators, musicians and QA staff whose credits made it possible. Sandfall promised a free content update after award season and says its next game will not necessarily be an RPG. A live-action film with Story Kitchen was already in development before launch, and Macron's second congratulations — for the nine-win Game Awards night — framed the studio as a national showcase.