Fuck that, use this opportunity to give us home ports of two games that never left the arcade. Planet Harriers and Outrunnners for sure! Meanwhile, Star Citizen laughs and laughs at what you just wrote. "They said my kind of games don't make money, lmao"
I was was mostly speaking in general, exceptions can and do happen of course. Although to be fair, most of Star Citizen's contributions occurred in the crowdfunding campaign done after the kickstarter was over.
Sony is officially funding development and assisting with development efforts on the game (via NeoGAF). Looks like we truly are getting a real Shenmue sequel.
It truly wouldn't be a true sequel without the company that's always been behind the truly amazing Shenmue games: Sony.
It's too bad Sega's in such a state of affairs that their involvement seems to be none. Also kind of ironic that Sony is helping Shenmue 3 become a reality, considering Sony killed the Dreamcast.
OutRunners was, but let's not talk about that "port"! :v:/> I mentioned Turbo OutRun and Power Drift as the former has never had an arcade-perfect home release, and the latter only got its arcade-perfect port released in Japan. Plus they would fit in better with a game set in the 80s than Planet Harrier or OutRunners would, not counting the fact Ryo has a Sega Saturn!
I know many of you hate them, but Kotaku has an article about Sony's support for the game that might be a little bit easier to gleam details from: http://kotaku.com/sony-is-helping-make-shenmue-iii-1711819045 This news makes me feel better about this. I dropped $160 as my initial pledge, (mostly because I want the shirt but don't really want the art book) but I'm hoping they'll announce a physical PS4 version before this is over. I'll probably up my pledge to $250 if the news we hear over the next month is promising. I had a potentially terrible idea today that I'd like to see them consider. It would be neat if they could let some backers voice NPC's. (Not main characters, but random people out and about) I'm not one of those people who disliked the voice acting in the first two, I thought it was okay, but some of NPC's were lacking. I'm guessing it's because they had the same actors playing 10+ different people, trying to sound different. I do recall multiple people having the exact same voice in Shenmue 2. Obviously they'd have to screen for quality, but I think they could get more variety this way. Does this sound terrible, or might it be a decent idea to propose to them? Edit: Just noticed that the character description for Yuan on the new Shenmue site reflects the original Japanese version. If there are any references to him in Shenmue 3, I wonder if they'll stick with Yuan as female for the localization or not.
Kickstarter is not solely about the presold copies. They are milking the tiers that are cheap enough that they don't give you a game, and more expensive(orders of magnitude) than the biggest purchase you'll be able to make otherwise. There is also, you know, the actual sales of the game AFTER its being released. I betcha it'll sell 1+ million copies day one. Also not everyone is willing spend $30 on something that is promised to come out in 2 years. Is it coming, maybe, maybe not. There are many kickstarters and other games that don't meet the release deadlines. And is the game going to be what you expect? Would you preorder Aliens: Colonial Marines? The game being cheaper NOW argument - If everyone can wait 2 years If everyone can wait 16 years to get the game, then sure as hell they can wait 1 additional month on steam when the game gets a discount. And if you put the $30 in the bank today, you'll have enough for whatever day one price they have.
If it'd sell 1+ million copies day one, it would have been made earlier. And this is a good thing. Backing something on Kickstarter is always a big risk, and it's great that people are playing it safe with their money. That's why the target is $2 million and not $42 million.
To quote myself: And yes, I do know how kickstarters work. I've backed plenty of games on there myself and I'll probably end up backing Shenmue 3 as well. My initial post was a reply to NickonAquaMagna (who claimed that kickstarters prove that games have a viable market) giving examples on why kickstaters are not impressive in general from a sales perspective, which is what most corporations would look at to determine if a game has a viable market or not. I also pointed out that the reason kickstaters are successful in their funding is because they target the smaller/hardcore demographics in the first place that are willing in shell out larger than normal funds.
You know what, while I'm seriously stoked for more Shenmue, I actually care more about Yu Suzuki being back making games than I care about Shenmue 3. The man is way too talented to do [basically] nothing for 15 years.
So I just (yesterday and today) played through the first game to refresh my memory. For the past 8ish years, playing through the games has been a yearly ritual for me anyway (usually starting sometime around November 29th :v:/> ) The thing is, I'm still finding new things. Today, among other things I succeeded in breaking the cat's timeline. :v:/>
Famitsu article screenshot. The model's face in here looks a lot more accurate than the one in the Kickstarter page. Dreams do come true.
Yu Suzuki did an AMA! I haven't read much of it, but it looks like he's revealed details for his vision on Shenmue 3 (amongst other things).
Apparently there's a big stink with Sony and them not contributing any more to the project financially. I'm heading this via w word of mouth so I'm taking it with a grain of salt, but can anybody clarify this for me?
Nothing has been confirmed officially, everything that has been said is just speculation. You're not going to hear anything official from either party, due to contractual obligations. Yu Suzuki apparently said in an interview somewhere that the majority of the money will be coming from the kickstarter. I don't know what source that's from. In one of the interviews on YouTube, the Sony guy says that they'll be "helping to make the game". Perhaps they're going to provide staff to handle QA, or other development tasks? Just some reminders about things that have been said already: 1. Just because it cost $78 million to make the first two Shenmue games, doesn't mean it will cost that much or more to make the third. a. Sega wasted a lot of money on work they had to re-do or throw out. The entire Saturn version for example. That's years worth of effort that they had to pay people for that was never released. b. They don't have to write a graphics or physics engine either, since they're using Unreal Engine. So from a development standpoint, they just need to worry about gameplay this time as opposed to the entire system as before. c. They can be sloppier and less efficient when it comes to coding, since the PS4 has 8GB of RAM and significantly more graphics and CPU power than the Dreamcast did. Nowadays, there are a lot more developers than there were 15 years ago (in my opinion) and they're not as good at coding as the people who had to work hard to optimize code back then. Since the lead programmer from the first two games is back for this one, he's probably going to be able to be able to re-create the same things he did long ago a lot quicker than back then. 2. Games cost less to make than they did back then, as long as you're not breaking new ground and need to develop your own tools to do it. a. Small indie teams can churn out games with scope that cost millions to make in the Genesis era for a fraction of the cost that it did back then. I'm sure Freedom Planet cost a fraction of what Sonic 3 did to develop, and they're very comparable games. b. Motion capture was rare and expensive back then, now anyone can do it with relatively cheap hardware. Not everything has gone down in cost (Voice actors) but at least the building part of things has. I'm extremely biased, having backed the game, but the people who are complaining about Sony's involvement (or lack thereof) are failing to understand that Sony is a business. They're not going to throw money away at something which won't be profitable for them. The kickstarter doesn't entirely prove much. At the time I'm writing, less than 45,000 people have pledged for the game. That's not very many sales compared to something like uncharted that sells 20x as much. The average pledge right now is $80, which is more than they would earn selling the game and only shows that the current backers are long time fans willing to spend lots of money to see this get made. Normal people who want to try it for the first time aren't going to be willing to pay that much. When this actually comes out and they need to look for funding for Shenmue 4, then Sony will actually know whether or not it's worth it for them to spend money on. In the meantime, the fans are able to support it, and that's good enough. (Despite what Kicktraq says right now, I'd guess this campaign will probably end somewhere around $8 million. It sounds like they probably have stretch goals planned up to around 10 million.)
