Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has won a lot of awards since its release in April, even taking home to coveted Game of the Year Award at the 2025 Game Awards. Developed by a small team with a $10 million budget and a solid idea, the turn-based RPG has lit a fire under the games industry.

Speaking to FRVR ahead of the release of the Nintendo Switch 2 port of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader and the alpha release of Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy, Owlcat brand manager Anton Emelyanov explained that Expedition 33’s success has proven to the games industry that smaller teams are key to truly creative experiences.

“Smaller teams often have a clearer creative vision and tighter decision-making processes.”

Owlcat Games brand manager Anton Emelyanov

While Owlcat Games is a much bigger studio than Sandfall Interactive, the studio is split into a number of smaller teams working on their own projects, including the upcoming Mass Effect-like The Expanse: Osiris Reborn. For Owlcat, these smaller teams are what allow the studio to focus intently on specific ideas whereas major AAA studios often suffer from the bloat of having too many chefs in the kitchen.

“Smaller teams often have a clearer creative vision and tighter decision-making processes,” the brand manager explained. “They can take risks, iterate quickly, and focus deeply on specific strengths rather than broad feature sets.”

“When this aligns with audience expectations, these projects can outperform much larger productions,” he continued. “Owlcat has followed a similar path: we started as a relatively small team and have grown steadily while keeping that experimental mindset.”

Emelyanov explained that “recent hits like Clair Obscur, Dispatch, Hades II, or Silksong” prove that players are willing to meet developers halfway when they take a risk for the sake of innovation. When that risk pays off, you have a multi-award winning game of the generation like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, or a unique CRPG like Rogue Trader.

“It’s clear that players appreciate innovation and strong storytelling, areas where many smaller studios excel,” the brand manager said. “We also aim to make the kinds of games we genuinely want to play, and we believe the community understands and values that approach.”

As a studio developing deep CRPGs, Owlcat’s audience may be different from the more casual, cinematic affair that has captured the minds of many Clair Obscur fans, but Emelyanov explains that there’s a common link between both game genres: fantastic stories.

While the curtain may be closed on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, there are a lot of fans and gamers looking for strong stories out there. Whether that’s Sandfall’s next RPG, whenever that comes out, Larian’s upcoming Divinity, whenever that comes out, or Owlcat’s The Expanse, there’s a lot of stories cooking for a very hungry gaming audience.