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

[tiffac]

Aerys said:
And just to say, i find that quite funny people complain about this when it's Sony but no one complained about Kingdom's Come while it's the exact same situation, they needed some amount of money to convince their investor

So you are saying this happened before?