Shenmue 3 reaches $2 million funding goal on Kickstarter
Yu Suzuki's Shenmue 3 has met its funding goal of $2 million in just 9 hours.
Sony announced a Kickstarter campaign for the long-overdue Shenmue 3 during its E3 press conference last night, and after 9 hours, the campaign has met its funding goal of $2 million.
As of this writing, the campaign has close to 30,000 backers that have pledged $2.3 million towards the project, and those numbers continue to steadily rise. There are stretch goals that will add cinema shorts of Shenmue 1 & 2 at $2.5 million, subtitles for Dutch, French, Spanish, and Italian-speaking players, a Rapport System at $3.2 million, a Skill Tree System at $3.5 million, and if the project reaches $4 million, Baisha Village will be expanded along with the inclusion of five mini games. Seeing as the project continues to earn funds with 31 days to go, we wouldn't be surprised if all of these stretch goals are met.
During last night’s presentation, series director and producer Yu Suzuki took the stage to show a brief demo of Shenmue 3 and to announce its Kickstarter campaign. The title will be a true sequel to the classic open-world action RPG games, Shenmue and Shenmue 2, and will be created for the PlayStation 4 and PC.
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replyDaniel Perez posted a new article, Shenmue 3 reaches $2 million funding goal on Kickstarter
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It was an awesome adventure/fighting game for the dreamcast. Emphasis on adventure. It's the game that invented QTE. Also the 2nd game was ported to xbox1. It was created as a 3 part series and they made 2 parts and then the 3rd part was never finished. Like 10+ years went by and now they are finally kickstarting the 3rd one.
super epic storyline mixed with cheesy dialog and cheesy but fun minigames. Also has built in 80s arcade games because it's based in the 80s-
It wasn't planned as a 3 part series, it was planned as 16 chapters with the first game covering one chapter and the second covering 2-4, with subsequent games covering ????
http://shenmue.wikia.com/wiki/Shenmue_III -
"It's the game that invented QTE."
I thought you were listing positive bullet points?-
Well there was a reason so many copied it. That said I thought Dark Cloud invented qtes.
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you just weren't sick of them then and there weren't better ways to do that same gameplay at the time
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Forklift simulator.
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Darts simulator with realistic vending machine action. Eat virtual snacks in between rounds!!!!!
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Must help to get your Kickstarter promoted on such a large stage.
Feels kinda skeezy...
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Two things, they need way more than $2M to make that game. I am guessing they need $5-10M. Our smallish game (in comparison) will end up costing at least $2M. Secondly, is this just Sony's way to test the waters? They could easily afford to fund this game themselves.
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it's pretty lame
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Yah the first game had a $70million budget! lol
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Did it? Holy crap.
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Yeah I imagine this is just some weird way of gauging interest where Sony agreed to fund X more millions if they could do a successful Kickstarter.
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the whole thing is dumb though because you know there's a core set of Shenmue fans who can generate say 500,000 in sales. Whether you can get them to pitch in $2 million says nothing about whether it's worth funding for sales to non-Shunmue fans. It doesn't actually solve their market research problems, it just makes gamers pay (ie take on risk) for something Sony (or whoever) should be paying for.
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Same here. For small indies it makes sense. No funding most likely means the title wouldn't sell well. There are exceptions of course due to poor marketing and messaging during the KS campaign. For big pubs it seems like a way for them to mitigate risk at the expense of other smaller projects that might get funded as there is a finite amount of money people will spend on KS.
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I don't see what the problem is. They do what every gamer whines about wanting to do, show interest in an idea or abandoned franchise to get it into production.
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they picked $2 million, at $50/each that's 40k people. Can they really not figure out that there're 40-80k Shenmue fans? Of course they can. This is just free money.
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Again why not? The fans willingly gave money, got a substantial discount on the game for the base package compared to retail, and if you had money hats you could get some extras that wouldn't have been available otherwise.
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it just feels a little slimy to use what is supposed to be a crowd funding platform for ostensibly people/projects that actually need funding for your project which doesn't need funding at all. It's also slimy to use it for only x% of your funding and not make that in any way clear. It's now just a way to create collector editions that scale up to $10,000 and it dilutes the value of Kickstarter and the ability for small teams to get funding when they actually need Kickstarter to provide 100% of their funding.
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they've currently sold ~32,500 preorders at $80/ea with much more to come, far more than they'd usually be able to charge, and years before they'd normally be able to capture that money. Free money.
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what's wrong with free money?
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for a business with no stake in crowd funding as a model? nothing. For crowd funding as a whole, it causes problems.
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of course it's smart, it's just abusing a system designed for something else that we liked better. Sony could afford to spend the money to actually gauge interest, but this is a cheaper way of doing it. Unfortunately the side effect is that it makes the service worse for the little guys that actually needed it.
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This.
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Shenmue 3 does not cost $2 million to make. How much does it cost to make? No one knows. They're certainly not telling us. How much is Sony providing? It's certainly more than 50% of the total funding if they're actually aiming for $2 million. What if Sony ends up funding 80% of the project? If they were willing and capable of funding 80% of it they clearly believed in the project and could've afforded 100% of the funding (or scoped it to reduce the required funding). But instead they just get access to free, no risk funding from their customers where normally they'd have to take out an actual loan to get millions of dollars years ahead of delivering anything.
How can someone who actually needs 100% of their funding from Kickstarter come and ask for $5 million for anindie game if 'Shenmue only cost $2 million'? That's what these new Kickstarter 'customers' learn from the big guys using Kickstarter.-
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I don't know that it's Sony, it's someone though, doesn't really matter exactly who.
trying to shop this thing around to get picked up and funded, and if the kickstarter failed the project is dead in the water.
This just isn't what Kickstarter began as. It's wasn't Series A funding before getting a bigger round. It was the actual funding amount to produce a thing. Even if it does morph into this thing, it's laughable how opaque it is. So where in the risks section is the "I need to raise another $x million to actually make the game"? Or the risk that "if this doesn't exceed the goal by 2x I probably won't get enough funding" etc.
I'm sure these kickstarters are giving low-info customers a skewed idea of how much software costs to make, but then again so do things like 99c apps on mobile phone stores.
To some degree that's true but this is far more direct. Everything about this page is claiming that Shenmue costs $2 million to make. Someone trying to infer costs from a sale price is pretty different from someone saying "I need $x to make this, please support me getting towards that goal."
Pick a different number than $5 million. What if you need $1-2 million (7-10 devs for 18 months)? "Well Shenmue only took $2 million and look how much we got for that! You're ripping is off!" Since they're abusing the system and not being transparent about the additional funding no one has any idea the true cost.
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Who is the audience that knows Shenmue, but is completely unaware of Kickstarter?
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You can't accurately gauge consumer willingness to pay just by "spend(ing) the money". The only way to do so accurately is via revealed preferences/behaviour. In terms of determining demand for an unreleased product, I suspect something like kickstarter strictly dominates any focus-group/survey method regardless of money spent.
I'm not really sure how it makes the service worse for little games. The system is only rival in the sense that consumers have limited money available to buy products. So if people fund Shenmue 2, then maybe they won't fund Derelict515's Favourite Indy Game. However this probably isn't a problem because A: that means that people prefer to spend their money on Shenmue 2 than DFIG, and B: DFIG would have exactly the same problem if Shenmue 2 were released/funded in a traditional way - consumers still make a choice between buying Shenmue 2 and buying/funding DFIG. Either way, it's the existence of Shenmue 2 (and the competition it represents for consumer interest/dollars) which hurts DFIG, not whether or not Shenmue 2 is on kickstarted or not. It's not like kickstarted has a limit on the number of projects they list at once. Nobody is being crowded out of kickstarted.-
So it absolutely is rival because yes consumers have a limited amount of money to put towards kickstarter projects, especially if big games like this are more likely to grab your $100 tier money.
More problematic is the way it anchors costs for other Kickstarters. Without any transparency into how much funding Shenmue 3 actually requires how do I say my game that looks much smaller requires 3x the funding? Oh it's because I'm asking for 100% of the money I need but Shenmue only asked for ... well I don't know what percentage but it must not have been all of it. Except customers don't see behind the curtain so all it looks like is you asking for a ridiculous amount of money for some indie game.-
The first issue really has nothing to do with kickstarter - Shenmue 2 is competing with DFIG whether or not it is funded via kickstarter. I don't think individuals have specific separate budgets for "games on kickstarter" and "games from steam/EB/whatever". If you think this is the case, you would need to provide some pretty strong evidence.
The second issue might be important, but how important? Do you think individuals spend a lot of time comparing total project goals on kickstarter? I'm not convinced that total goal anchoring plays a significant role in most individuals decisions of which projects to fund.
The bottom line is that everyone benefits from firms having better information about consumer preferences (which is what kickstarter provides). Suppose Sony funds some game that eventually flops because people don't care about the product. That's not just a disaster for Sony, but also for gamers, since all of that money and resources could have been used to produce a kickass game that people actually wanted to buy/play! If kickstarter allows firms to better gauge which projects should get backing and which shouldn't, then that benefits gamers and developers alike.-
If you think this is the case, you would need to provide some pretty strong evidence.
Obviously neither of us are actually going to find ant evidence either way. Anecdotally I fully believe people have a separate kickstarter budget. How much are people willing to spend on things that are unproven and years away? Especially if they have yet to see a return on their investment with a quality product coming out the other end.
The second issue might be important, but how important? Do you think individuals spend a lot of time comparing total project goals on kickstarter? I'm not convinced that total goal anchoring plays a significant role in most individuals decisions of which projects to fund.
The types of people who pay attention to kickstaters are surely at least vaguely aware of the funding levels. Unless this is literally your first one and you haven't heard or looked at others you have at least one point anchoring you. And if the argument is these large publishers increase the pool of kickstarter customers for the little projects then that's specifically adding people who have now been anchored to a fake funding number.
If kickstarter allows firms to better gauge which projects should get backing and which shouldn't, then that benefits gamers and developers alike.
Sure, and it's unfortunate that the manifestation of that information is an interest free, no risk loan provided by many people who don't know any better. Nowhere else can you get millions in loans interest free, with no downside without needing to create even the slightest semblance of a real business plan. You don't even have to disclose your employee count and timeline because the average gamer is too uninformed to think about this and it's easier to fleece people when you're asking many for little instead of a lot from one. Instead of an informed investor you get to take advantage of frothing fans with no business sense at all.
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the thing is the most successful kickstarter projects have never really benefited the "little guys" as much as the big players. it started with double fine, which is a great developer but they aren't exactly tiny, either, and now it has only snowballed from there.
in order to really level the playing field you'd basically need to exclude the major players by putting in some kind of ceiling for investment and developer size, or by barring developers that have some sort of conditional investment deal based on kickstarter goals. maybe something really punitive, like if it comes out a dev had a contract like that, they're on the hook for all kickstarter rewards but people get their money refunded.-
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I would be far more ok with this practice if:
1) the actual funding amount was transparent. Am I funding 10% of the game or 100%? Why are you asking me/us for $1-2 million if you've already got someone lined up to fund $20 million?
2) the risks section wasn't a joke. If this is your attempt to pitch to a publisher you better be very clear about that. You better tell me how much more you need from a publisher and how much you think you need from fans to prove to a publisher that this is worthwhile.
In the meantime it's just abusing customers' complete lack of business acumen and poisoning the well for the guys who don't have publishers coming in later.
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It's weird that something like a cooler will get $13M from 60,000 people, but for games, it seems like only "proven" commodities (or at least proven developers) pay off:
https://www.kickstarter.com/discover/advanced?state=successful&sort=most_funded
I'm not sure what makes people have more confidence in some random guy to deliver a good cooler vs. some random developer to deliver a good game.
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Here's an oldie but a goodie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgmCdt4EgxU
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