Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has already made history as the highest user-scored game on Metacritic by a significant margin (9.7/10 with nothing else above a 9.3), but now it’s starting to get sales that reflect its quality.
Sandfall has announced that just 12 days after launch, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has sold 2 million copies, a wild success for a brand new IP made by a brand new, tiny developer. For context, EA reported 1.5 million players “engaged with” Dragon Age: The Veilguard in its first fiscal quarter, which was half what they wanted, and that also included players using their EA Play subscriptions. Blown out of the water here.
That was of course a much worse game than Expedition 33, which is already being called one of the best RPGs possibly ever, mentioned in conversation with the decades-long Final Fantasy series and again this is a first offering from the brand and studio. Totally insane.
For me personally, not only do I agree with all the praise, I’ve personally forced at least three of my friends to buy the game and surprise, all of them like it. When word of mouth spreads this quickly, this is how you speed toward two million sales in under two weeks.
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With Grand Theft Auto 6 booted out of 2025, there is a much greater chance that Expedition 33 could win GOTY this year (not that GTA 6 would have been a guarantee, but still). However, in this third of the year alone we’ve also seen the stunning Split/Fiction and Blue Prince. Still, I don’t think anything has seen this level of hype and public reception (Split Fiction has an 8.9 on Metacritic, Blue Prince has a 7.7). I genuinely believe we’re looking at a generational game here, and honestly, I’m surprised the game press didn’t score it even higher, albeit its 92 is tied with Blue Prince for the best game of 2025 so far.
I’m wondering just how high Expedition 33 ride Esquie in terms of long-term sales, but at this point it’s already a brilliant success and everything else is just icing. This is clearly the birth of a very important RPG franchise, and if you want to get in on the ground floor I would highly recommend picking this game up. I don’t care if you don’t like RPGs or turn-based games (I don’t), it fixes that, and is a must-play.
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