Sandfall Interactive, the studio behind the award-winning RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, has made no secret of the fact that it prefers to keep its development team small. Creative director Guillaume Broche and lead programmer Tom Guillermin reiterated the idea in a new interview with Edge magazine (via GamesRadar), where the duo spoke about continuing to keep the scale of their projects small in the future as well.
When asked about whether the next game by Sandfall Interactive will be bigger than Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Broche gave a definitive answer: “No, I think it’s good to have limitations when you are creative.”
“It’s the best way to be the best version of yourself. We could scale up now we have a lot more money, but I would say it’s not tempting for us, because even the management team and myself, we’d have to be hands-on and doing things for ourselves. We love making games more than we love managing, so we want to keep doing that. These past five years were some of the best of my life, and I want to be happy like that again,” he said.
Guillermin noted that a small team allowed everyone to essentially know each other, which in turn helps with better communication in game development. He also spoke about how, with the success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the team now has a strong foundation to start building out its future projects, before noting that a large team isn’t really needed to make and ship high-quality games.
“In terms of team dynamics, everybody knows everybody in the team, and people are used to working together,” explained Guillermin. “Now we are lucky enough to have a strong foundation from the previous project, but expanding for the sake of expanding is not our vision.
“Our vision is to ship quality games, and we don’t believe you need to have a lot of people to do that. There are large teams that deliver great games, of course, but for us what works best is pretty much our current size. We don’t want to change the team structure and dynamic.”
Broche had previously spoken about how things at Sandfall Interactive wouldn’t really change much in light of the critical acclaim of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. He also confirmed at the time that the studio doesn’t have plans to grow its headcount.
“We don’t want to grow too much as a company,” he said. “We work well as we are now, as a small team, and we want to stay like that, because we are very happy, and why change?”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 came out on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S last year, and since then has garnered near-universal praise and acclaim before going on to win several awards. The studio is currently working on its next project, and while it hasn’t revealed any details yet, COO and production director François Meurisse noted that the studio has been feeling “a bit of pressure”, and that it is working on “some great ideas we’re so excited to explore.”
For more on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, check out our review.
