榮獲年度最佳遊戲的《光與影：33號遠征隊》的開發預算「不足1000萬美元（7054萬）」。它沒有採用「流行的開放世界」模式，從而大幅度降低了遊戲成本。
《光與影：33號遠征隊》開發商Sandfall Interactive的CEO Guillaume Broche近日接受《紐約時報》採訪，透露了遊戲製作的幕後細節，並表示該遊戲的預算不足1000萬美元。
相比之下：
今年發售的《天國降臨：救贖2》的開發成本約為60億日元（2.7億元）
《刺客教條：暗影者》的開發成本則超過170億日元（大約7.7億）
此外，在如今大型「3A」級遊戲開發成本動輒高達幾億美元的背景下，《光與影：33號遠征隊》不足1000萬美元的開發成本顯得格外低廉。
據Guillaume所說，《光與影：33號遠征隊》通過避免採用「開放世界」的潮流來節省資源。這款遊戲還借鑑了回合制角色扮演遊戲的「慣例」，設計了長長的走廊式關卡，並使用專門的戰鬥區域。這意味著，與採用開放世界系統不同，設計師無需繪製所有細節，但仍然能夠讓玩家感受到世界的廣闊。
Guillaume還提到，這種小團隊開發日式角色扮演遊戲（JRPG）的方法由來已久，是一種成熟的技術。在開發《光與影：33號遠征隊》時，Sandfall Interactive大約有30名成員。
雖然一些開發工作，例如質量保證和本地化，是外包的，但小規模開發很可能是為了節省資源，才採用了回合制RPG模式，並且遊戲場景設定在一個獨立的區域內，而不是開放世界。因此，開發成本據信控制在1000萬美元以下。
Guillaume特別指出，關於遊戲開發的膨脹問題，他認為「能夠跟得上無限提高質量要求的公司並不多」，他預測，作為行業趨勢的一部分，開發預算將會受到限制。
此外，他還表示，目前的規模足以開發像《光與影：33號遠征隊》這樣一款全價回合制角色扮演遊戲，並且他沒有擴大工作室規模的計劃。看來，工作室很可能會繼續以「合理」的規模和開發成本開發遊戲。這款在降低成本的情況下製作完成並獲得好評的遊戲，或許可以成為未來眾多遊戲的典範。
光與影：33號遠征隊，IGN日本只給了7分
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, made for under $10M, shows just how broken AAA Gaming budgets are. I've lead and produced many AAA projects, and adjusting for today's salaries, it breaks down like this: Art is HUGE. It can easily be much more than this, 50% of dev budget for cinematic and movie style narrative games. But art doesn't actually guarantee a hit. It's more like the cost of entry to be visually competitive to be considered AAA. You'll easily drop 100M on the art, even outsourced to Asia. Clair Obscur kept art costs very low, using Metahumans as a base and iPhones for motion capture. They put the money into refining the gameplay over 5 years and innovating there instead. The result, much more bang for the buck. But the marketing in AAA? Complete dinosaur thinking in the age of social media. TV spots, Superbowl spots, etc. just don't make sense anymore. Riot Games CEO called me when they were just starting out. They were very worried about marketing and standing out against DOTA and HoN. They didn't have any money for marketing. I told them not to worry about it, backing up Riot's intuition that marketing spend is the worst place to put your investment. He let me know that they had spent less than 1000 dollars so far and was glad to hear that I agreed with their strategy: reach out to players directly. This was the smart play. The biggest factor in making a hit game is not the marketing (mobile is different, you have to pay for user acquisition or you never get traction). The biggest factor is GAMEPLAY. Some studios are ART driven by culture. Others are PROGRAMMER driven (OG Id Software and tech), and OG Blizzard was DESIGN driven. We also spent nearly nothing on WoW marketing for launch (5M or so, way less than War 3). Later on they spent much more because they were very worried about user churn in a sub based game (but putting marketing money into a proven success is valid to keep the machine growing). I think the results speak for themselves. AAA is struggling because design took a back seat to art. If I had to rank the payoff strategies it would be: Design first Programming second Art last AAA should ditch their antique marketing budgets and pour the money into being Design first.
