If you were looking at the calendar, the week that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S with a day one launch on Xbox Game Pass, considering the fact that this was Sandfall Interactive’s debut title, and (though you may not have known it at the time) it would be competing with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, you’d be forgiven for thinking Clair Obscur didn’t have a strong shot at standing out that week.
Not only was Oblivion Remastered’s shadow-dropping in no way a hindrance for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but according to Xbox Wire, it became, and would remain, the biggest new third-party launch on Xbox Game Pass in 2025.
You might have some conspiratorial thinking around that news, thinking that Xbox started tracking this metric to jump on the Clair Obscur hype even more as we inch closer to The Game Awards and the feeling that gaming’s modern zeitgeist has already dubbed Clair Obscur to be the game of 2025 (especially after its sweep at the Golden Joysticks), but this is actually something that Xbox began tracking only last year, when Palworld became the biggest third-party launch on Xbox Game Pass ever.
And, in fairness, considering Clair Obscur’s appearance in January’s Developer_Direct video is at least partial proof that Xbox has been behind the Clair Obscur hype for a long time now.
The size of the launch is measured by the number of unique users who played the game within its first 30 days of availability, which means that in its first month of release, when the whole industry seemed consumed by the Clair Osbcur craze, a lot of players rushed to Xbox Game Pass to see what all the fuss was about.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Was The Biggest New Third-Party Xbox Game Pass Launch in 2025
