I haven't touched my copy of the game in nearly a year... that's not a good sign, is it? >.> Granted I've been pretty bad about finishing stuff in my backlog, and it didn't help when I heard that the PS4 has disc drive problems, so I've been very reluctant to put any discs into it for nearly a year. Although I did watch all of season 4 of Twilight Zone on DVD with it so maybe I'm good.
I mentioned this in Discord, but since this thread is still alive: ShenmueDojo conducted an interview with Cedric Biscay this month, released today. Cedric was an Executive Producer on the game and his company Shibuya Productions funded some of it. The interview is over an hour long, but near the end the interviewer asks about Shenmue 4. Cedric confirmed that Shenmue 4 is not in development at this time but they did do some prototyping to create a video to pitch the game to publishers. He said that the pandemic has made pitching the game difficult because they can't have in-person meetings with publishers like they are used to doing, and he hasn't even seen Suzuki-san in person since February. They never mention Deep Silver by name during the interview and instead he says "The publisher" multiple times, and he said he felt that the game could have been better promoted by the publisher because it was not understood well. He also thought the Kickstarter communication was not handled as well as it could have been. The fact that they're trying to pitch the game to a publisher implies that Deep Silver obviously was not interested in green-lighting the next game right away. They also could not discuss sales numbers on Shenmue 3, but pointed out that when a game sells very well that the publisher would usually brag about it by releasing the numbers. The interview begins with Cedric talking about his background, his history with Sega consoles, how he learned about Shenmue, and his involvement with Shenmue 3. They also talk briefly about the other stuff he and his companies do, the chess manga he helped create, what he hopes they can do better if in Shenmue 4 if it is greenlit, and Shibuya's recent co-produced game "Twin Mirror".
