Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the conclusion to the remake trilogy, will launch in spring 2027. That is just three years after the second game, Rebirth. By modern AAA standards, where five years or longer is typical, that is fast.

Director Naoki Hamaguchi told Bloomberg the reason is simple: 95% of the development team stayed together from Rebirth. “The big benefit of the Final Fantasy VII Remake series is that we never had to go through that process, so the transition was extremely quick,” he said.

The industry norm is to disband teams after each release, then spend months reassembling for the next project. New people need new roles, new trust, new workflows. Hamaguchi avoided all of it by starting Revelation’s design a year before Rebirth shipped, then moving the same team straight into production.

The results show in the numbers. Remake took years of pre-production. Rebirth took four years. Revelation took three. Each game shipped faster than the last with the same people doing the work. Hamaguchi and Final Fantasy XIV director Naoki Yoshida are the only two leaders at Square Enix who maintain persistent teams across projects. Both run the company’s most successful franchises.

“I think it’s something that we should be mindful of as a company,” Hamaguchi said. “Because this did bring out a really huge benefit in terms of speeding up and having an efficient development timeline.”

The lesson arrives at a brutal moment. Xbox is planning major layoffs in July under new CEO Asha Sharma. Microsoft and Meta have cut tens of thousands of jobs this year while redirecting spending to AI. The gaming industry lost 11% of developers in 2024 according to GDC’s annual survey, with 41% affected directly or through their teams.

Hamaguchi’s interview also revealed design decisions shaped by player feedback. Mini-game rewards in Revelation will be purely cosmetic, not tied to combat strategy as they were in Rebirth. The Highwind airship will let players fly around the entire world with no invisible walls, a feature Hamaguchi pushed through despite engineering objections. A new job system called FITS offers four unique classes per character, each with deep skill-tree progression.

Only four or five people at Square Enix knew the title “Revelation” before it was announced. Hundreds of developers learned the name at the same time as the public.

After Revelation ships, Hamaguchi said his next project will not be a remake. He is considering a AA title, a new Final Fantasy, or an original AAA franchise. He would love to keep the team together but acknowledged the tension: holding talent in two persistent teams “staggers and hinders the growth of the company.” Tech companies keep cutting teams and wondering why the next thing takes so long. Hamaguchi proved what happens when you don’t.

Football managers spend countless hours analyzing corners, free kicks, and player positioning in search of tiny competitive advantages. Google DeepMind believes artificial intelligence can make that process significantly faster, and its latest project, TacticAI, is designed to do exactly that. TacticAI is a football-specific AI assistant capable of modeling player movement, forecasting future play dynamics, and even recommending tactical adjustments for corner kicks. One of its standout abilities is predicting player trajectories up to eight seconds into the future using only broadcast-style visual data.

TacticAI was built with Liverpool FC and validated by football experts

Unlike general AI models, TacticAI focuses specifically on football tactics. Using geometric deep learning, the system analyzes the positions and interactions of players during corner kicks before generating predictions about what could happen next and suggesting alternative player arrangements that may improve outcomes.

Perhaps more importantly, the model wasn’t just tested in a lab. Google says its usefulness was evaluated through a qualitative study with football experts at Liverpool FC, who compared the AI’s recommendations against real match scenarios. According to the published research, experts preferred TacticAI’s suggested tactical setups 90 percent of the time over the original match configurations, highlighting the system’s practical value rather than just its statistical performance.

The benchmarking results are equally impressive. TacticAI outperformed existing baseline models in predicting both the likely receiver of a corner kick and whether a shot would occur afterward, while also generating realistic alternative player layouts that closely resembled genuine professional match situations.

This could be much bigger than football

The research is already moving beyond the lab. Google DeepMind has now announced a partnership with Brazilian football club Palmeiras, making it the first team to meaningfully build on TacticAI to simulate on-field scenarios and predict open-play dynamics up to eight seconds in advance. If successful, it could mark the beginning of AI becoming a genuine tactical assistant on the sidelines, not just another analytics tool running in the background.

We’re teaming up @Palmeiras, the first football club to meaningfully build upon TacticAI: our AI system that can help simulate field scenarios and predict open play dynamics up to 8 seconds in advance. pic.twitter.com/M3Krejk9Er

— Google DeepMind (@GoogleDeepMind) June 11, 2026

What’s more, is that the underlying technology has applications far beyond sports. Similar predictive models could one day assist autonomous robots, traffic systems, logistics planning, or any environment where understanding and forecasting coordinated movement is critical. And perhaps that’s the most fascinating part of TacticAI. On the surface, it looks like an AI built to help coaches win football matches. Underneath, it may be quietly laying the groundwork for machines that understand and anticipate complex real-world interactions before they unfold.

Defense tech is red hot right now. Anduril and Mach Industries just doubled and quadrupled their valuations, respectively, and the U.S. government is proposing a 40% increase in defense budget. A wave of new startups is chasing those government contracts, but according to Ross Fubini, the venture investor who wrote Anduril’s first check, most of them will get lost in the Valley of Death between prototype contract and real production deal.  

Watch as, on this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan asks Fubini — the founder and managing partner of XYZ Venture Capital, built on the Palantir alumni network and now approaching $2B AUM — what separates the survivors from the rest. 

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