‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’ Praised By French President Emmanuel Macron Following Game Of The Year Win, Sees Huge Boost In Sales
After Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won The Game Awards 2025 Game of the Year — and numerous others — it has received high praise from French President Emmanuel Macron. The game has also seen a boost in sales, showing just how influential the ‘GOTY’ accolade can be. All this has been achieved with a budget of less than $10 million; a fraction of a AAA game’s usual budget.
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Whether fans voted for it out of love of the game, or to spite the AAA industry that crushed their developers and produce ‘less,’ Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won The Game Awards 2025 Game of the Year. In total, Sandfall Interactive’s first game would go on to win nine awards, and a further two nominations.
It also won Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, Best Art Direction, Best Score and Music (by Lorien Testard), Best Independent Game, Best Debut Indie Game, and Best RPG. The game was also nominated for Best Audio Design (won by Battlefield 6), and Player’s Voice (won by Wuthering Waves).
Jennifer English (Maelle) also won Best Performance, though Benn Starr (Verso) and Charlie Cox (Gustave) were also nominated. Not bad for a studio who initially turned to Reddit for voice actors and actresses. The original post has become a place for fans to visit “where it all began,” and share their praise and congratulations.
The accolades and extra eyes also brought more information to the forefront. While we already knew Sandfall Interactive was started by former Ubisoft employees. Zachary Small’s report for The New York Times revealed how CEO and Creative Director Guillaume Broche took to the internet and YouTube to learn what he didn’t know about creating games.
The game’s lead writer applied after the aforementioned Reddit post, Testard was discovered through Soundcloud, and investors were more interested in its applications for the metaverse. While initially the developers to asked friends and family instead, publisher Kepler Interactive would eventually come to their aid.
Most surprising of all was the budget. AAA titles such as Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 had a budget of $300 million, and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War was $700 million; all while it’s “difficult for even best-selling games to recoup their costs” as Small puts it.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had a budget of less than $10 million. Small praised the game avoiding the open-world trend and utilizing older design choices that RPGs used to make out of necessity to keep that budget lean. Broche noted, “We have the tech now to make those games with a relatively small team. Games like this are coming. We are lucky to be early.”
Under Kepler Interactive, a team of 30 people (with outsourcing for battle animations, localization, and marketing), sold over 5 million copies. Even that figure is now undoubtedly higher thanks to The Game Awards.
Rhys Elliott, Alinea Analytics’ Head of market analysis, proposed that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has now sold six million copies, “and boosted Game Pass engagement, too.”
“Overall, Expedition 33 has shifted another 200K+ copies since the Game Awards aired. Around 76% came from Steam, while 21% from PS5. That means just 3% of Expedition 33’s copies sold since The Game Awards came from Xbox. Clearly, Game Pass is cannibalising premium sales here,” Elliot theorizes.
SteamDB also noted a spike of almost 57,000 concurrent players after The Game Awards- and the game having a free “Thank You” update with additional content.
Even the French President has praised the game’s success. Having previously praised the sales milestones back in May of this year, Emmanuel Macron once again took to Instagram to commend the achievement.
“Do you recognize it? Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has just been named Game of the Year in Los Angeles,” prefaced the French head of state (machine translation via DeepL).
Macron added, “A historic first for a French title! A source of great pride for Montpellier and for France. Congratulations to the teams at Sandfall Interactive. For generations to come and those that will follow!”
For those interested, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is currently 20% off on Steam until December 18th, 20% off on GOG until January 3rd, and 20% off on the Epic Game Store until January 8th.
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