{"id":440547,"date":"2025-12-11T17:22:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T17:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/440547\/"},"modified":"2025-12-11T17:22:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T17:22:11","slug":"clair-obscur-wasnt-just-good-it-was-also-cheap-to-develop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/440547\/","title":{"rendered":"Clair Obscur Wasn\u2019t Just Good, It Was Also Cheap To Develop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Much has been said about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33\u2019s<\/a> success and the business calls that made it an unexpected frontrunner in the 2025 Game of the Year race. Now we\u2019ve learned that the game was somehow made for less than $10 million.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In an interview with The New York Times<\/a>, Sandfall Interactive co-founder and CEO Guillaume Broche said that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33\u2019s budget was a tiny fraction of your average AAA game, coming out to \u201cless than $10 million.\u201d To put that into perspective, Insomniac\u2019s Spider-Man 2 cost around $300 million<\/a>. Clair Obscur managed to avoid those ballooning budgets by aiming for a much smaller scale and refusing to chase the modern open-world bloat that has some games costing huge fortunes and taking half a decade to make.<\/p>\n

As Broche lays out, Sandfall made a string of creative decisions that would allow the studio to create a lot with fewer resources, a smaller team, and a reasonable budget. One major example is how the game\u2019s overworld is a miniature recreation of a map, rather than a full-blown open-world space. This allowed the devs to present an explorable universe to players without having to create something on the scale of open-world games that show off every detail as players walk through it.<\/p>\n

Sandfall is an independent studio<\/a>, but much of Clair Obscur\u2018s funding came from publisher Kepler Interactive, and some parts of development (including battle animations and localization) were outsourced. The result is that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 manages to have all the polish of a prestige AAA game at a budget that a lot of other publishers would have you believe can\u2019t possibly produce games of its quality.\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s still a false narrative floating around the internet that only 30 people<\/a> made Sandfall Interactive\u2019s breakout debut RPG. While yes, the company itself may be smaller than your average studio, Clair Obscur was also developed in collaboration with contractors<\/a>. The numbers don\u2019t lie, though. When blockbuster development costs are ballooning, Clair Obscur proves you can make a hit that still looks and feels impressive without breaking the bank.<\/p>\n

It also, thankfully, is not a massive time sink. I rolled credits at around 30 hours, while most RPGs last at least twice as long. Broche told The New York Times he hopes Clair Obscur\u2018s success will help bring the cost of developing AAA games back to a more reasonable range.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have the tech now to make those games with a relatively small team,\u201d Broche said. \u201cGames like this are coming. We are lucky to be early.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 2025 Game Awards<\/a> are tonight, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has 13 nominations<\/a> across multiple categories, which is the most any game has earned in the event\u2019s decade-long history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Much has been said about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33\u2019s success and the business calls that made it an…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":440548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[8954,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-440547","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-clair-obscur-expedition-33","9":"tag-technology","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115702093775477633","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=440547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/440547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=440547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=440547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=440547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}