Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Launches on Steam with 145k Concurrent Players and 'Very Positive' Reviews (92% Positive)

Pretty impressive growth last days, you can tell the word of mouth is starting to kick in.

Went from 50k peak on release day on thursday, to 70k on friday, to almost 100k on saturday, 2x and tomorrow it'll be a bit better still.

For example Assassins Creed Shadows went from 40k to 60k in the same time, Veilguard from 70k to 84k.

Wouldn't be surprised if next weekend's peak is really close to this one's, which isn't a common thing to happen.
 
Damn got soo close to 100k today, hopefully tomorrow. Regardless this game is already a success, lots of people on my PS5 friends list playing it too, I'm sure it's doing great across the board.
 
Yeah, gonna be hard to go back to regular ol' turn based ever again. The combat is fantastic and lots of fun.
Only time in X amount of years that Atlus had been challenged and 33 beats Atlus combat now for me.
 
Good shit, tomorrow should hit 100k....should hit a million copies next week. Gane is great. Cant wait to play more tomorrow. Ya, best turn based and amazing music.
 
I could have played veilguard for free, but bought this instead. Having a great time. I rather spend money on good stuff than wasting time with garbage.
 
Only time in X amount of years that Atlus had been challenged and 33 beats Atlus combat now for me.
Definitely leaps and bounds better than anything Atlus has produced in terms of combat. It also shits on every Final Fantasy released in the last 19 years.
 
Putain, what a great game. I love the surreal Belle Epoque vibe.

You hardly ever get surprised these days outside of indies, but this one feels like a breath of fresh air. It gave me that sense of wonder you feel less and less with age. These devs had the balls to try new things and have been instantly rewarded. They deserve all the success they get.

Making turn based gameplay more active was a stroke of genius with the QTE's, parries and dodges. A ton of fun and damn cinematic.

I'm not that far into the game but this feels like the front runner for GOTY quite easily for me.

I run it on PC with RenoDX injected HDR which looks perfect most of the time, but at one point in the mansion the screen was so dark I couldn't see shit. But I read it's a Nvidia driver issue so should look into it, apparently there is a hotfix that fixes it. Not releasing HDR on PC in 2025 is ridiculous though, but thank god for RenoDx giving us customizable HDR in games. I run it on everything I can.

I also run that mod which improves image clarity by removing sharpening and blur, that helped a lot, as well as turning off some post-processing effects. Still looks a bit TAA soft to me, but I can live with it.
Still it could do with a couple of patches. It is incredibly demanding for a non-RT game.
 
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Dig this track by Lorien Testard:



Reminds me a bit of Astor Piazzolla's Libertango:



Japanese Twitter/X reactions about the game have been interesting. Both awe and praise as well as some being angry towards folks voicing frustration at SE for abandoning the turn based gameplay in main entry FFs. Some have even called it "Final fantasy 17" or "The true FF16".

There's also apparently some claims about it selling out at various online Japanese retailers like Yoboyashi and Rakuten (due to low stock).
 
Japanese Twitter/X reactions about the game have been interesting. Both awe and praise as well as some being angry towards folks voicing frustration at SE for abandoning the turn based gameplay in main entry FFs. Some have even called it "Final fantasy 17" or "The true FF16".
Well I'm happy for Ben Starr that he finally got to voice act in a Final Fantasy game!
 
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100k barrier passed!
 
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It's already doing better than ATLUS who is an established company for jrpgs, so good for them. The industry needs to evolve rather than regurgitating same generic shit with different skins or milking the same franchise over and over. Wish the team all the best.
 
Dig this track by Lorien Testard:



Reminds me a bit of Astor Piazzolla's Libertango:



Japanese Twitter/X reactions about the game have been interesting. Both awe and praise as well as some being angry towards folks voicing frustration at SE for abandoning the turn based gameplay in main entry FFs. Some have even called it "Final fantasy 17" or "The true FF16".

There's also apparently some claims about it selling out at various online Japanese retailers like Yoboyashi and Rakuten (due to low stock).

Weird, I thought the Japanese audience would only play RPGs with a teenage self insert protagonist and tons of shounen anime tropes. Have the Japanese culture experts been lying to me?
 
Gothic, Commandos, Blade of Darkness, Kingdom Come, Stalker... Dude where have you been, europe has been making cool videogames since forever.
Mate, that wasn't the point I was trying to make. Of course they've had succeses, big and small, in the past. I wasn't trying to say EU is new to the game. I was specifically talking about more contemporary smaller and AA studios.

Seems like I didn't make my point/context clear enough for some.
 
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I love that Jason and his media friends vision of the industry is that every game should be like Veilguard, Suicide Squad, and Concord…. And they get repeatedly rejected by the open market.
 
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smaller and AA studios.

Have you heard of this company called Larian who made the best crpgs on the market called Divinity Original Sin series and Baldurs Gate 3? Have you heard about CDPR who were still AA when they made Witcher 2 and 3? 4A with Metro series? KCD1 &2? Disco Elysium? Alan Wake? Hitman? and many more. Literally the biggest franchises were made from Europe by AA studios before being bought by the big evil American corporations or published.
 
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Going to update the OP once it reaches its player peak for the day, which should be within an hour.

I'm really curious to see how it will perform in the second weekend though. Based on the very good word of mouth, there's a good chance it will have a higher peak CCU in its second week, something that happens very rarely (off the top of my head, the games that have done this are Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3).
 



I love that Jason and his media friends vision of the industry is that every game should be like Veilguard, Suicide Squad, and Concord…. And they get repeatedly rejected by the open market.

It's amazing that a biomass called Jason is able to earn money in the video game industry at all. Who's his audience, aside from that purple cancer? Who's paying his bills?
 
Have you heard of this company called Larian who made the best crpgs on the market called Divinity Original Sin series and Baldurs Gate 3? Have you heard about CDPR who were still AA when they made Witcher 2 and 3? 4A with Metro series? KCD1 &2? Disco Elysium? Alan Wake? Hitman? and many more. Literally the biggest franchises were made from Europe by AA studios before being bought by the big evil American corporations or published.

What franchises are you talking about? Either way, it takes two to tango. Any studio that gets bought is by the owners choice so blame Europeans as much as Americans if we just gotta point fingers.
 
Single player narrative heavy games targeted to mature audiences isn't going to turn into a bigger cash cow than GAAS. That being said, there'd still a big market for there games and people are willing to pay for quality.

See Expedition 33 blowing up like this but also look at the Plague's Tale Series, KCD2, Yakuza's popularity continuing to increase, etc. There's a huge audience for these games and it's generally not American companies making these games.
 
120K CCUs on Steam.. With over 1M+ sold, likely means splits are probably something like:

PC = ~475K
PS5 = ~550K
Xbox = ~75K

Game is doing incredibly well on PC and PS5 by the looks of things. I wonder how it's doing on GamePass?
 
Going to update the OP once it reaches its player peak for the day, which should be within an hour.

I'm really curious to see how it will perform in the second weekend though. Based on the very good word of mouth, there's a good chance it will have a higher peak CCU in its second week, something that happens very rarely (off the top of my head, the games that have done this are Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3).
That's true about Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate 3.

I would guess both of those games had a higher second week to extremely positive word of mouth and being 100+ hour games.

Clair Obscur is having extremely positive word of mouth but is a bit shorter 30 to 60 hours. I guess we will see!
 
Man what a fucking tool. Maybe this is another "rare incel victory"

This is real "DEI" bullshit that affects real people. But if we are going to start pointing out white males as a problem simply because they are white and male then how about we start with this guy....

Ebmj1S9O_400x400.jpg
 
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This is real "DEI" bullshit that affects real people. But if we are going to start pointing out white males as a problem simply because they are white and male then how about we start with this guy....

Ebmj1S9O_400x400.jpg
The problem is, I'm certain that guy would agree with you
 
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This is real "DEI" bullshit that affects real people. But if we are going to start pointing out white males as a problem simply because they are white and male then how about we start with this guy....

Ebmj1S9O_400x400.jpg
wow, what a brave warrior. Casually tossing around insinuations of racism/sexism against people he doesn't know + scoring internet points for hollow virtue signaling. I'm inspired by his great personal risk and sacrifice in the name of justice, he's like a modern day Rosa Parks.
 
This game is SO GOOD. You can feel the soul that went into making it. The kind of soul that usually gets snuffed out by committee for a game of this scope.

Kind of disappointed it's on Game Pass because I've been playing it on there and therefore don't need to buy it on Steam. These folks deserve every sale they're earned and more.
 
Glad to see this game succeeding on Steam! Too bad we'll never find out if the game is as equally accepted on consoles.
 
120K CCUs on Steam.. With over 1M+ sold, likely means splits are probably something like:

PC = ~475K
PS5 = ~550K
Xbox = ~75K

Game is doing incredibly well on PC and PS5 by the looks of things. I wonder how it's doing on GamePass?
PC should be higher than PS5 based on steam CCU and PS store placement.
 
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