Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 shows how good video games should be made

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an indie game made by an extremely small studio of just 33 people (I do not know if the number in the title of the game is a reference to that or not) founded in 2020, which appeared almost from nowhere, and has taken the gaming community by a storm, breaking all kinds of sales numbers records for games at this budget level, and possibly getting the best user scores ever for a video game and, perhaps a bit surprisingly in this day and age, even getting very good reviews from "professional" game reviewers (who are notorious and infamous for always going against the "gamers" and bashing what they like, just because they like it.)

And the thing is that the game is not some kind of very small retro-style 2D game like Balatro or Shovel Knight. This is a full-on open-world 3D game with modern graphics and professional-quality acting, motion-capturing, cutscenes and so on. It's in no way out of place along big-budget triple-A games from huge game studios.

And all this done with a moderate budget in just a few years, by an extremely small team of 33 people.

This in a world where humongous game studios with literally tens of thousands of employees and budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, are taking ten years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop games that struggle to even get a positive return of investment. Some of them even failing catastrophically (like the infamous disaster that was Concord.)

What is the key difference between this team and those ginormous game studios?

Well, one key difference is very obvious: This small indie game studio has 33 competent expert developers (some of them actually former Ubisoft employees) and team members. No diversity hires, no "diversity officers", no management obsessed with enforcing "DEI" into the company. Just 33 competent people focused on developing a high-quality game, and not concerned with identity politics.

What happens when a small group of talented people get together to create a high-quality game, ignoring identity politics? Well, we can see the result.