“When that first started, right off the bat: Shenmue 3, Shenmue 3, Shenmue 3. “Shenmue 3 was the number one requested game on the whole building the list campaign,” said Corsi. We set a goal of two million dollars, and if the fans come in and back it, then absolutely we’re going to make this a reality.”Ĭorsi said Sony’s been mulling Shenmue ever since its “build the list” initiative was started in 2013, in which the company solicited fan requests and tried to turn some of them into a reality. We thought Kickstarter was the perfect place to do this. “We said the only way this is gonna happen is if the fans speak up. When asked whether or not Sony should give the greenlight for Shenmue 3, Sony Director of Third Party Relations Gio Corsi had this to say:
At first, the campaign only had a mere few mentions of what they'd do if they surpassed their funding amount. While the campaign runners did end up catching on to the concept of stretch goals, it took them days to scramble to come up with ideas. Yes, one of their stretch goals was actually a "new Kickstarter record." I'm speechless. While this is not the first Kickstarter to use fan money simply to gauge interest, (Bloodstained, for example, is securing 90% of its funding from outside Kickstarter, with the Kickstarter project being used as a means to confirm there’s loads of fan interest in the game) Shenmue 3 seems particularly dicky. Shenmue 3 will receive most of its budget from a third party, likely with their own ideas on how the game should be made. While studios like CD Projekt RED were able to fund games like Witcher 3 for a similar amount of money, they were entirely self-published. For Shenmue, the main privately funded budget with Sony will be in the ballpark of $20 million, in addition to the already amassed Kickstarter sum. The important thing to realize is that a lot of crowdfunded games use the initial fan based investment to bankroll the actual game’s budget from private venture capitalists. A day after the Kickstarter was launched, Sony openly stated they would be supporting the game in terms of publishing costs. In the case of Shenmue 3, it appears that the success of this Kickstarter campaign is being used to underwrite a far larger sum to get the game made. What everyone seems to be forgetting is that the original Shenmue released in 1999 for Dreamcast literally held the Guinness World Record for the most expensive game of all time (at the time) with a production budget of $70M ($99M, if you adjust for inflation).Īfter the campaign took off, the questions started coming in as to what the historically pricey Shenmue can truly do with 2M, and things became complicated. Yesterday, after one month of crowdfunding, the game closed at $6,333,295 of its $2 million initial goal, setting a world record for Kickstarter’s most-funded video game of all time. By the end of Sony’s press event alone, it had already racked up a few hundred thousand dollars in donations. It probably would have taken even less time, but for the first hour or so, the Shenmue announcement actually took down Kickstarter altogether. Less than twelve hours after the Sony show, Shenmue 3 hit its $2 million funding goal.
#SHENMUE 3 PHYSICAL COPY SERIES#
Series creator Yu Suzuki was teasing it a day before, but no one really could have expected it given the game’s 13 year hiatus. When Shenmue 3 was announced during E3, the whole world went crazy.
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