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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Sells 3.3 Million in 33 Days — Not Bad for a Game Some Thought Was Going to Get Crushed by The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Sells 3.3 Million in 33 Days — Not Bad for a Game Some Thought Was Going to Get Crushed by The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered

Yahoo10-06-2025

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has hit another impressive milestone: 3.3 million sales in 33 days. That's a lot of threes!
Publisher Kepler Interactive and developer Sandfall Interactive announced the sales today, after the turn-based RPG crossed 1 million sales in its first three days of release.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched on April 24 across PC and console, but also straight into Xbox Game Pass as a day-one title. It also launched up against Bethesda's RPG behemoth The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. But despite being in a subscription service and having that tough competition, Clair Obscur has carved out a significant slice of sales success for itself. It's worth noting the 3.3 million sales figure does not include additional downloads through Xbox and PC Game Pass.
Kepler declared Clair Obscur 'a commercial success' and 'a feat for an independent production.' 'The game was developed by a small studio made up of around 30 core team members, some of whom were working on a video game project for the very first time,' Kepler added.
When Bethesda shadow-dropped The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered amid the launch of fellow role-playing game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, most thought there could be only one winner. However, it turned out that there was plenty of room for both games to succeed.
Indeed, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has done so well that French President Macron has praised the development team. Be sure to check out our tips for the important things to know before heading into the game.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

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Every conversation like this is so riddled with holes that you couldn't get them across a puddle, yet they are inescapable. Fans want it to prove their long-standing theories about the video game industry right and treat its success like an irrefutable data point in every argument. It's not a new phenomenon either; this cycle tends to happen with lots of both successes and failures. Baldur's Gate 3 inspired a wave of talking points about what players actually wanted from games. That line of thinking was met with backlash from developers who cautioned against using a very specific win as a crusade. Black Myth: Wukong became a rejection of Western ideology. Concord was viewed as proof that live service games are dead. I both understand where this comes from, because I'm as guilty of it as anyone. It's fun to search for meta-narratives in the things we care about. I'm a football fan (go Pats) and I love nothing more than creating a story out of a Super Bowl matchup. 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There's a familiar trauma in it, as the fictional Gommage and its impact on the world can be connected to the Covid-19 pandemic. We just went through – and are still going through – a period of mass suffering. Those wounds are fresh. I still remember seeing the pop-up morgues on the streets of Brooklyn. I remember watching the infection rates fall and then spike again, ripping any hope I had for an ending from me. I remember how hopeless it all felt. But I also remember how many people put in hard work to stop it together. Even if some people refused to do their part, many masked, stayed home, kept six feet apart, and anything else they could to stop the spread. It was a collective effort built on selfless sacrifice. I feel all that fueling Clair Obscur's emotional resonance. It begs to be discussed, because what is the point of something being a generational classic if we take nothing else from it? One of the only meaningful conversations I've had about Clair Obscur came before it was out. I had been playing it alongside our reviewer, Tomas Franzese, at the time and we dissected its themes together in isolation. We both cooled on it significantly in Act 3, taking issue with its sudden pivot into a meta-reflection on the nature of art and its role as an escape from grief. It felt like a betrayal on its more human focus earlier on; a needless swerve into a piece of art evaluating its own importance. It was a memorable discussion that helped crystallize where I felt Clair Obscur worked best and where it ultimately fell apart. I hope that discussions like that become more common as the hype settles down. Just as I felt turned off by the 'art about art' pivot in Act 3, I am similarly bored by the tedious talk about how Clair Obscur is changing the industry. None of it does anything to honor Sandfall Interactive's vision, even if it is designed to gas the studio up. 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