Sony has just confirmed that now that the Kickstarter goal has been reached they are in fact helping with funding and development of Shenmue 3

[UltimateUnknown]

ReimTime said:

DerNebel said:

ReimTime said:

But it seems so strange to have a deal based upon a variable like that. They could have funded it without asking for 2 million in Kickstarter first. I wonder how many people will be cancelling their donation now that it is exclusive (assummption)?

THat shouldn't be a problem, the Kickstarter specified that this was going to be PS4-PC only anyway.

Did it? I guess I missed that. I have some friends that were pretty sure it was coming to other consoles.

But that's a moot point. I'm still quite curious why they wanted to kickstart that 2 million. A funding deal would have been in the works for months before E3. Why wouldn't they have just funded the whole things? The interest was definitely always there. Maybe Sega was the variable; only agreeing to accept the offer if public interest was completely proven. Still doesn't make complete sense to me though.

I think the idea was that Sony wanted to see if the people asking for Shenmue 3 weren't just a vocal minority and there was at least a sizeable userbase who would be interested in this game before they moved in to fund and market it fully.

Although technically 2 million is nothing in terms of game development, it is a MASSIVE amount for a base kickstarter goal when most games ask for a couple hundred thousand. Most devs are afraid to ask for too much (nothing more than a million) because if they don't reach that goal they get nothing. So Sony was being very bold and set a very high Kickstarter target to see if a sizeable bunch of people would fund it and generate hype at the same time.

Needless to say, the game getting funded in less than 12 hours is a clear green light for Sony to fund this game fully and help Suzuki develop it without any restrictions, which is what Gio said in the stream. It all makes sense to me.