Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 passes Metaphor: ReFantazio's 85,000 player Steam peak - it's now in the same league as its heavyweight JRPG inspirations

Sandfall Interactive, the developer behind new turn-based game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, was very outspoken about how the team was overtly influenced by several classic JRPGs, including multiple Final Fantasies and Atlus' Persona series. The game's now proven to be such a breakout hit that it's even surpassing some of the genre heavyweights that inspired it.

At the time of writing, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has managed to court over 87,000 concurrent players on Steam and counting (we're still early in the weekend so expect that to grow a little bit), according to SteamDB. That's a great result for an original series from a brand new developer, no less, in a subgenre that was considered stagnant a few console generations ago.

To put that into context, though, Expedition 33 now has a higher concurrent peak than every one of developer Atlus' games on the platform, nearly doubling Persona 3 Reload's 45,000 peak and, more notably since it's not a remake, narrowly passing Metaphor: ReFantazio's 85,961 peak.

That's some impressive company to be keeping so early in the developer's life span (did I mention Clair Obscur's its first game?) and it must be nice to be in the same league as the heavyweights that inspired you.

What's especially notable is that Sandfall Interactive pulled it all off while launching in the shadow of Oblivion Remastered's stealth drop and while releasing on Game Pass on day one, but the developer managed to sell over 500,000 copies within a single day regardless.

Here's 9 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 tips to take on the Paintress.