The announcement of Final Fantasy VII Revelation at Summer Game Fest 2026 didn’t just get people excited for the trilogy’s conclusion — it sent sales of the first two games through the roof. Trilogy director Naoki Hamaguchi has confirmed in an interview with Automaton that both Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth are performing well beyond what Square Enix anticipated, describing the post-announcement sales response as “enormous.”
What Hamaguchi Said, Exactly
“They are doing extremely well,” Hamaguchi told Automaton. “Even before Summer Game Fest 2026, both FFVII Remake and Rebirth had been selling steadily. Back when Rebirth was announced, every time it became a hot topic, sales of Remake would rise. Similarly, I’m sure every time Revelation attracts attention, more people will become interested in Rebirth.”
The director couldn’t share hard numbers — Square Enix’s investor relations policy limits what he can disclose — but he was willing to say this: “I can’t share specific figures, but sales are several times better than we had expected. I think fans and dedicated fan communities are very interested in how many copies the games have sold, but I can say they’re performing even better than most people probably imagine.”
That’s a meaningful statement from someone who presumably knows the actual numbers and chose those specific words anyway. “Several times better than expected” isn’t the kind of diplomatic non-answer you give when you’re quietly disappointed. Square Enix has historically been tight-lipped about this trilogy’s commercial performance — which some fans interpreted as cause for concern — so Hamaguchi going out of his way to signal that sales are exceeding projections by multiples is worth paying attention to.
Why the Sales Surge Makes Sense
The pattern Hamaguchi describes isn’t new for this trilogy — it’s the same flywheel effect that drove Remake’s sustained performance leading into Rebirth’s launch. A new entry in the series creates buzz, that buzz drives curiosity about the earlier games, and people who were on the fence finally pull the trigger. With Revelation confirmed for Spring 2027 on PS5, Switch 2, Xbox Series X/S, and PC simultaneously, there are now millions of potential players on platforms that never had access to the series before — and the Revelation reveal was their signal to start catching up.
The multiplatform expansion of the trilogy has also been a major part of this story. Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade arrived on Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X/S on January 22, 2026, followed by Final Fantasy VII Rebirth landing on Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X/S on June 3, 2026, ending a two-year wait for players on those platforms. That June 3 launch came just two days before Revelation was revealed at Summer Game Fest, meaning millions of Switch 2 and Xbox players had only just started Remake and Rebirth when the third game was suddenly announced. The timing was essentially perfect.
Rebirth’s Switch 2 launch sold 30,657 physical units in its opening week in Japan alone, with an estimated 45,000 total including digital sales — and Rebirth actually outsold the Switch 2 debut of Remake, which had tallied around 35,000 estimated units at launch. That growth from the first game to the second on a brand-new platform is the kind of momentum that bodes very well for Revelation.
PC Is a Bigger Factor Than People Realize
Hamaguchi also called out the PC market specifically as a growth driver that’s become increasingly important to the trilogy’s performance. “The English-speaking market remains very strong on PC, but the Simplified Chinese PC market has also grown to a comparable level,” he said.
That’s a significant callout. The Chinese PC gaming market is enormous, and the fact that it’s now pulling comparable numbers to the English-speaking market on a Japanese RPG franchise suggests the trilogy has found genuine traction in a region where Square Enix has historically struggled to make inroads. The multiplatform strategy that Square Enix committed to for this trilogy — dropping the PlayStation exclusivity window that hampered Remake and Rebirth’s early reach — is clearly paying off in ways that go beyond just adding new console sales.
Minigame Feedback Is Shaping Revelation’s Design
Hamaguchi used the Automaton interview to address one of the loudest ongoing fan conversations around the trilogy: the minigames. Rebirth had a lot of them, and while some players loved the variety, a vocal chunk of the community found them frustrating — particularly when progression or story rewards were gated behind mandatory minigame performance.
Square Enix has been listening. Hamaguchi confirmed that Revelation’s minigames are being made skippable, and that reward structures are being adjusted based on community feedback from Rebirth. “When it comes to gameplay and game design, especially playability, I believe we absolutely have to keep listening to players and minimize points of frustration wherever we can,” he said.
That’s a direct acknowledgment that some of Rebirth’s design choices created friction that the team wants to resolve for the finale. The fact that they’re making minigames optional rather than doubling down suggests Square Enix understands that the criticism wasn’t about the minigames being bad — it was about feeling forced through them when you just wanted to push the story forward. Making that skippable serves both camps: players who love the side content still get it, and players who don’t can move on without penalty.
Hamaguchi also addressed the famously heated discussions around the trilogy’s story and character relationships: “When people discuss and get heated about the minigames, the story, or the relationships between characters in FFVII, I think that only happens because they see value in those elements.” That’s a diplomatically gracious take on a community that, at times, has been anything but gracious about those debates — but it’s the right attitude for a director trying to thread the needle between staying true to a 1997 game people love and giving this reimagining room to do something new.
90% Staff Retention Through All Three Games Is Remarkable
One of the more quietly impressive details in the interview is what Hamaguchi shared about team stability. More than 90% of the staff who worked on Remake have stayed with the project all the way through to Revelation — something he noted surprised people outside Japan when he mentioned it.
“I think the fact that so many people are working on this project with a firm commitment to seeing it through to the very end is certainly due in part to the strength of the FFVII IP, but also because we were able to create this project surrounded by fans who have tremendously high expectations for it,” he said.
In the context of an industry that’s been gutted by layoffs over the past two years — with tens of thousands of developers displaced across the sector — a team that has stayed together across three major releases over several years is something worth acknowledging. That kind of continuity matters for a project like this. The creative vision, the internal knowledge of how the systems and story connect, the shared understanding of why specific design decisions were made — that doesn’t carry across easily when a team gets turned over. The fact that Revelation is being built by largely the same people who built Remake gives it a coherence that’s genuinely rare in triple-A game development at this scale.
Physical Release for Revelation Still Undecided
One question that’s still open: whether Revelation will get a physical release at all. Square Enix hasn’t made a decision on that front yet, despite the game launching a full year before Sony phases out physical discs for PS5. The lack of a commitment either way is a little surprising given that Remake Intergrade had both physical and digital releases when it came to Switch 2 and Xbox — but given how much is still being finalized for a Spring 2027 launch, it’s possible this is simply a decision that hasn’t been made yet rather than a quiet signal that it’s going digital-only.
Whatever format it arrives in, the commercial momentum building behind the trilogy right now puts Revelation in a genuinely strong position for its Spring 2027 launch. Remake and Rebirth are pulling new players in from Switch 2, Xbox, and PC at the exact moment that hype for the conclusion is at its highest. That’s not an accident — it’s what happens when a multiplatform strategy and good timing converge.
For more on what Square Enix has been up to lately, check out our piece on the Kingdom Hearts Collection AI art controversy and how Square Enix handled the fallout. And for everything going on in the gaming hardware space that affects what you’ll be playing these games on, our breakdown of the Samsung memory chip shortage and what it means through 2027 is required reading right now.
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