Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been a huge success, despite the relatively small budget of developer Sandfall Interactive. With the team still surprised at how successful the game has become, the title has become a major part of the discussion of ballooning development budgets of AAA games.

With AAA games like Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us Part 2 costing over $200 million to develop, Expedition 33 is reported to have cost less than $30 million. While the team could’ve done a lot more with a massive budget, creative director Guillaume Broche explains that giving the team a AAA budget could’ve actually made the game worse.

“Maybe having unlimited scope and budget would’ve made it a less engaging game for our players”

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 creative director Guillaume Broche

Speaking to Automaton, Broche revealed that the giving the team “unlimited” resources at the start of their debut game would’ve ended up inflating the project, likely ruining the game’s perfect runtime with unnecessary “padding” that we’ve come to know of most AAA games.

“I don’t think we would have wanted to radically add unnecessary content or change the overall scope of our game,” Broche said, explaining that “part of the reason some fans enjoyed their time with our game was how we tried to respect the players’ time by not artificially padding out the game time excessively”.

When hundreds of developers work on a single project for half-a-decade with unlimited money, a lot of the time those games end up being inflated by needless quick-and-dirty side content to make the cost seem worth it. Broche explains that having a smaller budget means that the scope of the game is more focused, and there’s no space for fluff content when a smaller team requires all hands on deck all the time.

“In some ways, having a limited budget and resources is helpful to narrow down the scope of a title and distill the vision to the core elements that make it great, and maybe having unlimited scope and budget would’ve made it a less engaging game for our players,” the creative director said.

Of course, at the end of the day, Broche says “it’s hard to know” if Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would’ve been better or worse if the team has more money. Right now, it’s a beloved staple of the ongoing generation with developers from games like Lies of P and Cyberpunk 2077 praising the game since launch.

At the time of writing, Sandfall Interactive is planning a major content update for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to release in the near future, but the team already has ideas for its second project. While it will definitely be years until we see it, everyone is excited to find out what the team is cooking.