Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Hits 500,000 Sales in First Days After Launch
- Sagar Mankar
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has sold 500,000 copies just days after its release on April 24. This impressive milestone comes as a surprise even to its creators at Sandfall Interactive.
"A milestone for us, reached sooner than we'd ever imagined," announced the development team in a post on X/Twitter. "Thank you all."
The turn-based RPG launched across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, while also being available through Xbox Game Pass.
Despite facing competition from the surprise release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered just days earlier, the game has managed to establish itself in the market. Publisher Kepler Interactive had even jokingly compared the situation to "Barbenheimer" - a comparison that seems increasingly accurate given both games' success.
At $50 per copy, this sales achievement potentially represents around $25 million in gross revenue for Sandfall Interactive, a remarkable figure for a studio founded just five years ago.
According to SteamDB reports, the game has also reached a peak of 71,000 concurrent players on Steam alone.
The success extends beyond sales numbers. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 currently holds the highest rating of any game released in 2025, with scores of 92 on Metacritic and 91 on OpenCritic. These ratings put it alongside other highly praised titles like Split Fiction and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.
Developed by the relatively small French team of about 30 developers at Sandfall Interactive, the game draws inspiration from classic RPGs like Final Fantasy and Persona. Players follow a crew called the Expeditioners in a fractured, post-apocalyptic world. Every year, a mysterious entity known as The Paintress etches a new number and eliminates anyone older than that number. The Expedition's goal is to travel across the continent and defeat The Paintress to end this deadly cycle.
What makes this achievement particularly noteworthy is that the 500,000 figure represents actual copies sold, not just "players engaged" - a metric that can be inflated by subscription services like Game Pass.