Sandfall Interactive: How 30 People in Montpellier Made the Game of the Year
A first-time French studio with a small core team made Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, sold more than 8 million copies and won a record nine prizes at The Game Awards. And it says it will stay small.
Most Game of the Year winners come from studios with hundreds of developers and decades of history. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 came from a studio that had never released a game before, with a core team of about 30 people in the south of France.
Its developer, Sandfall Interactive, is now one of the most talked-about studios in the world. Here is how it got there, and why it says it does not want to get much bigger.
One idea, three founders
The project began in 2019 with Guillaume Broche, who started working on the idea on his own. He founded Sandfall with Tom Guillermin and François Meurisse. Broche is the creative director.
The studio is based in Montpellier, with a separate team in Paris working on cinematics.
Early on, Sandfall got public help. At the end of 2021, France's national film and moving-image centre, the CNC, backed the game's pre-production through its video game support fund.
A painting come to life
Clair Obscur is a turn-based role-playing game with real-time elements: players can dodge and parry enemy attacks as they happen. Its story follows a group of people sent on an expedition to stop a mysterious being called the Paintress, who each year paints a number on a monolith and erases everyone of that age.
Its look is one of its biggest draws. Art director Nicholas Maxson-Francombe drew on the Belle Époque and Art Deco, as well as influences such as Cirque du Soleil, The Lord of the Rings and Dune. The lead writer is Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, and Broche has named the musical film La La Land among his influences.
The music, by composer Lorien Testard with vocals by Alice Duport-Percier, became one of the most praised parts of the game.
A surprise hit, then a sweep
The game was published by Kepler Interactive and released on April 24, 2025, for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. It sold 3.3 million copies within a month, then passed 5 million later in 2025. By April 2026, a year after launch, sales had topped 8 million.
The awards followed. At The Game Awards 2025, Clair Obscur won nine prizes, a record for the show, including Game of the Year.
Staying small on purpose
After a hit like this, most studios would hire quickly and plan something bigger. Sandfall says it will not. In an interview, the studio said it does not plan to scale up dramatically and that its future games will be sized to the team it has, not the other way round.
That is an unusual choice in an industry that has spent the last few years cutting jobs after growing too fast. It also makes Sandfall a key example for a style of game that many people call "AA": smaller budgets and teams than the biggest blockbusters, but high ambition and quality.
Why it matters
Sandfall's success is good news for France's games industry and for anyone who thinks great games do not need huge teams. It is also a strong argument for public support: the CNC's early money helped a studio that went on to win the biggest prize in games.
It also changes the conversation about budgets. When a small team can win the industry's top award and sell millions of copies, it is harder to argue that only huge budgets deliver quality. Publishers and investors who spent years backing ever-larger projects now have a clear counterexample in front of them. For more on the wider market, see our Europe market report.
WGC's take: Sandfall's real test is the second game. Staying small worked once. Doing it again, with the whole world watching, is harder.
What to watch
- Any news on Sandfall's next project, and how big the team becomes.
- Whether more publishers fund small, ambitious "AA" games after this success.
- Clair Obscur's next sales milestone.