Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: sonicblur - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

JaxTH, on 18 July 2015 - 12:10 AM, said:

The advanced battle was 6 million. 6.5 was just rag doll physics for battle, which is built into the Unreal Engine that they're using anyway. Not sure if Suzuki-san was aware of this, but maybe they'll end up playing with those options anyway to see if it can be done for less money than they expected.


Post kickstarter thoughts:

• Echoing some previous comments, I don't think Paypal will help them much. The people who wanted to spend a lot of money on this had the means to pay via Kickstarter. The minority that's stuck with Paypal are probably just going to buy the game, and they'll be lucky if they manage to get a thousand more people interested.
  
• I think the people that wanted them to fire Awesome Japan and thought the game could have earned twice as much without them were completely wrong. They pretty much saturated the numbers of people willing to back the project. It had more backers than Bloodstained and Mighty Number 9, two of the biggest and well known kickstarter projects to date. The average amount spent per backer was $91.36, higher than both of the previously mentioned projects. I'm impressed by the numbers considering the limited fan base, and I don't think they could have done much better than this.
  
• It's a shame that the trolls managed to snatch up the 1 of a kind items (the watch and original jacket tiers) then cancel their pledges in the last 5 minutes of the campaign. Those items could have gone to people who actually wanted them.
  
• My pledge was collected this morning. I pledged more on this than any project I've backed in the past, so I hope everyone enjoys the game. (Including me)

flarn2006, on 10 July 2015 - 08:01 PM, said:

But the format (both of them) has already been decrypted. We already know what there is to know, and ValleyBell's decryption logic is open source. What else do you want?

synchronizer, on 03 July 2015 - 08:21 PM, said:

That image is wrong, I'm not sure where it came from. Yu Suzuki confirmed 11 chapters several years ago, 16 is incorrect. Also, Shenmue 2 was Chapters 3 4 and 5. It did not contain chapter 6. (Hong Kong was Chapter 3, Kowloon was 4, Guilin was 5). I was mostly referring to questions answered in the previous two weeks of the kickstarter, because the question of whether Shenmue 3 finishes the story or not came up on the reddit AMA two weeks ago and was vaguely answered then. It was re-confirmed at some point afterwards though that it won't conclude the story.

It's not really a knock against you. I suppose it doesn't help that the kickstarter hasn't gathered all of that information in one place. Perhaps someone has summarized everything somewhere, I'm not aware of it though.

synchronizer, on 03 July 2015 - 03:28 PM, said:

Then you haven't been paying attention. Shenmue 3 will not conclude the story, it just consists of the next 3 chapters, ending with Ryo's confrontation against the 4 leaders of the Chi Yo Men. Yu Suzuki stated that too much stuff would have to be cut to conclude with Shenmue 3 in a satisfying manner. It's another risk, but if 3 ends up being successful everyone would want 4 anyway. And if that's the case, it'll give 4 a chance to do better than 3.

It was obvious a week ago that they weren't going to hit 10, let alone 8 million. For the last 3 days it was stuck at 3.7 million, until they added the new rewards today. Now it's at 4.1 million, so I think the additional rewards helped. At this point though, they're still going to need to come up with a way to interest people who have never played the series if they want any more than $6 million.

DigitalDuck, on 27 June 2015 - 03:49 PM, said:

If it was one of those cables that goes from VGA to Component without a box in the middle to convert, those are intended for projectors and other equipment that supports component but doesn't have room for the ports. I have one, and that's exactly what I use it for. Devices actually capable of going from VGA to component aren't cheap. Monoprice makes one for around 40USD, not sure if there's an equivalent for overseas. You can also get VGA to HDMI for cheaper, but most of them don't support resolutions lower than 640x480. I've read that some Dreamcast games output VGA at 320x240, like the arcade games in Shenmue. Not sure if this helps, but maybe it's a start?




Now for some thoughts on the kickstarter so far. It seems to have slowed down more than I expected. At this point, unless they find a way to interest more people, it seems like it could end with around $6 million. If you do the math, the average pledge right now is around $80, and has been near that point for the past week. If you compare it to other game kickstarters, it's higher than the average for the other popular ones that I've checked. Mighty No. 9 for example had an average around $20 less. To me, this looks like the majority of backers at this point are people who have played one of the previous games and have a lot of interest for the new one. All of the higher cost rewards are taken, even the ones they added just yesterday. For people not as interested in the series, I'd expect more of the $30 pledges just to get the game for cheap.
I don't think they're doing a good job trying to interest people that aren't familiar with the series. It doesn't help that 'awesome japan', the company managing the kickstarter apparently has a really poor history with the past kickstarters they've done. Only about half of them were actually successful, and this is the first large one they've ever managed. I'm not sure how they can attract new fans to the series though. It seems likely that Sega will consider re-releasing 1 and 2 now that 3 is coming, but since that almost certainly won't be announced during this kickstarter they've eliminated one method of gaining new fans. Even more rewards will probably help them milk the existing fans for more money, but that can only go so far.

I do trust that Yu Suzuki can get the game made, even though the kickstarter won't give it enough funding to be as good as the previous ones. The biggest advantage they have over other games is the fact that the entire thing was planned out over 15 years ago. The script was done prior to the first game, and they already did some work on this back on the Dreamcast. (There are those 2 screenshots of Bailu village floating around from shenmue.com back in 2002. Who knows how much more they had done, considering how far the Saturn version was when they switched to DC.) Everything still needs to be built from scratch for the new engine and current hardware capabilities, but knowing exactly what they want to build is usually a huge obstacle for most projects and that part is done. The projects that fail or take considerably longer than originally estimated (e.g. Broken Age) don't have the story planned out yet and try to scope after the fact.