Sandfall Interactive apparently set out to prove a point, and oh boy did they: indie developers do not need bloated, city-sized budgets to ship something polished, imaginative, and—here’s the part that’s giving big studios hives—actually finished. You can practically hear every CFO in AAA gaming nervously rustling their stock options.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, or “Clair Obscur” for short, took the gaming world by storm earlier this year with overwhelmingly positive reviews, critical praise, and countless awards that put it up as the top contender for Game of the Year, which it is pretty much guaranteed to win. Assuming Geoff Keighley doesn’t get paid off to announce another game that is quite less undeserving.
For perspective, Game Freak’s Pokémon Z-A reportedly had a budget of $13 million, which is still shockingly lean for a franchise that prints money like it’s a side hustle. And yet that team somehow continues to squeeze out charming, content-rich games using what the average Western studio might consider their yearly snack budget.
"Sandfall wanted to prove that indie studios were capable of making prestige games at a fraction of the budget and personnel of larger studios…."Sandfall, which said the budget for Clair Obscur was less than $10 million…"Wowwww.nytimes.com/2025/12/11/a…
— Stephen Totilo (@stephentotilo.bsky.social) 2025-12-11T14:34:11.610Z
Now compare that to the perpetual hamster wheel that is Bungie’s Destiny 2. The game’s budgetary situation has become something of a cryptid—rarely seen, heavily rumored, and almost certainly cursed. But given the consistent pattern of minimum viable content, premium-price expansions, and seasonal updates that redefine the phrase “just enough to keep the lights on,” it’s not hard to imagine where the money is actually going. Spoiler: probably not into the guns, missions, or—heaven forbid—new enemy factions.
You don’t need to be an accountant to see the math problem here. If Clair Obscur can deliver an artistic fever dream on $10 million, but yet, Pokémon Z-A can disappoint an entire fanbase on $13 million (to be fair, Z-A had some solid QoL updates), then the only logical conclusion is that somewhere within certain AAA studios, a few executive pockets are inflating faster than the actual games. Because honestly, at this point the “budget” for some live-service titles feels less like a development cost and more like a tip jar for upper management.
So yes, Clair Obscur isn’t just an impressive indie success story—it’s a glowing neon indictment of the idea that games must be prohibitively expensive to look good, play well, or ship without half the features missing. Turns out the real drain on budgets may not be the art teams, or the engineers, or the cost of rendering a cape that behaves like a cape. It might just be the people who aren’t making the game at all.
