The games industry’s reliance on big budget titles is unsustainable, an expert says. ‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33,’ the first game from a small French studio, shows another way forward.
Seemingly everyone in the games industry, from developers to critics to players, is talking about “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.” Even French President Emmanuel Macron has praised it.
“Clair Obscur,” the first game from Sandfall Interactive, a relatively small team of French developers, has jumped ahead of so many bigger games and well-known names to become the breakout hit of the year. Sandfall’s debut is an exceedingly French role-playing game with turn-based combat inspired by Japanese classics like the “Final Fantasy” series and hyper-realistic graphics. It’s also a dark, compelling story about mortality, grief and the power of art set in a warped, fantastical version of Belle Époque France.
However, the most impressive thing about “Clair Obscur” is that it has the ambition of a big budget AAA game with the budget and team size of a mid-budget AA game. Its success should be a wakeup call to an industry dominated both by mega-budget games that need to sell hundreds of millions of copies to be considered “successful” and thousands of indies, says Ryan Maloney, a game producer with experience working for the biggest developers in the industry.
“That is what publishers and the people who fund games need to see right now, that smaller budget games can in fact be successful,” Maloney says. “There is only so much that individual developers or even individual studios themselves can really do to really shift the industry at large or even what their own company is doing. But a publisher seeing a game with an under $50 million budget selling [millions] of units … that shows a shift.”
After graduating from Northeastern University in 2019 with a degree in game design, Maloney worked at Epic Games as a production assistant on “Fortnite,” one of the most popular games in the world. He then joined Proletariat, working as a producer on “Spellbreak,” a short-lived battle royale game, before the company was purchased by Blizzard Entertainment and the team was assigned to work on “World of Warcraft.” Currently, Maloney is a producer at Demiurge Studios, which has supported work on games like Blizzard’s “Hearthstone” and the mobile smash hit “Marvel Snap.”
Over the last five years, Maloney has seen the games industry grow to “unsustainable” levels, he says. Budgets for AAA games have ballooned. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when gaming revenues skyrocketed, companies went on a hiring spree that has recently turned into mass layoffs on an unprecedented scale. Simultaneously, some studios have also started pulling out of the U.S. entirely.
That the delay of one game, “Grand Theft Auto 6,” sent tsunami-sized ripples through the games industry shows an industry too dependent on its biggest players. In that context, “Clair Obscur” is both a beacon of hope and a warning, Maloney says. It’s a reminder that one key to the industry’s sustainability is a healthy AA space of games that cost less and take less time to develop.
“Sandfall was founded by a guy who left traditional AAA dev to do this,” Maloney says, referring to Sandfall founder Guillaume Broche’s history at Ubisoft. “Right now, might be the reaction of ‘OK, we can’t pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a game if it’s not going to be a guaranteed hit like ‘GTA’ or something like that.’ That’s a baby step, but it’s at least a step of recognition.”
The industry seems to be slowly catching on. “Split Fiction,” the other most acclaimed game of 2025, is a AA game with a similar level of creative ambition, albeit with the backing of a AAA studio, Electronic Arts.
However, unlike “Split Fiction,” Sandfall is striving for a level of graphical fidelity that has historically been the domain of AAA developers. The studio’s use of the new game engine, Unreal Engine 5, proves for developers and publishers that small teams with smaller budgets don’t need to sacrifice AAA visual ambition, Maloney explains.
“Either a large team can hopefully make something really good faster than they were able to or it just allows a smaller, newer, more junior team to make something really good easier than they were able to before,” Maloney says.
AA games like “Clair Obscur” could also be a boon for an industry that, like Hollywood, has pivoted to a streaming service-like model. Xbox Game Pass, the most successful version of that model, gives players access to a constantly expanding library of games –– and new releases on day one –– for a monthly fee. “Clair Obscur” was available on Game Pass at launch.
“In that regard, they absolutely need middle ground games in order to satisfy that customer base and keep them around,” Maloney says. “You ultimately need new things coming to your platform as often as possible. Middle ground games help that happen because they come out faster, require fewer resources and smaller teams.”
However, “Clair Obscur” is not just a lesson for publishers and investors. Its budget and financials are directly connected to the creative risks the developers at Sandfall were able to take, Maloney says. AAA games need to be “approachable” for the widest possible audience, which sometimes means the edges that might make a game more creatively interesting get sanded down.
The often challenging combat system in “Clair Obscur” would have likely been “contentious” at a AAA studio, along with its specifically French cultural flavor, he says. Yet those are the very things players have connected with the most, proving there is a “hunger for stories and games that are not afraid to lean into what makes them different and what makes them special.”
“Everyone jokes that this is the most French game they’ve ever played, and I have used the same joke,” Maloney says. “But truly, having that cultural identity, having that personal identifiable and really deep identity helps show players how much passion there is … from the team leading it.”