Much has been said about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s success and the business calls that made it an unexpected frontrunner in the 2025 Game of the Year race. Now we’ve learned that the game was somehow made for less than $10 million.
In an interview with The New York Times, Sandfall Interactive co-founder and CEO Guillaume Broche said that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s budget was a tiny fraction of your average AAA game, coming out to “less than $10 million.” To put that into perspective, Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 cost around $300 million. 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.
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’s 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.
Sandfall is an independent studio, but much of Clair Obscur‘s 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’t possibly produce games of its quality.
There’s still a false narrative floating around the internet that only 30 people made Sandfall Interactive’s breakout debut RPG. While yes, the company itself may be smaller than your average studio, Clair Obscur was also developed in collaboration with contractors. The numbers don’t 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.
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‘s success will help bring the cost of developing AAA games back to a more reasonable range.
“We have the tech now to make those games with a relatively small team,” Broche said. “Games like this are coming. We are lucky to be early.”
The 2025 Game Awards are tonight, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has 13 nominations across multiple categories, which is the most any game has earned in the event’s decade-long history.
