Of course it's a marketing tool.
Kickstarter.com is a marketing tool, used by potential producer to gain visibility (and money) for their projects.

There is nothing wrong with doing this, think of this as a preorder page for people who really are interested. And the best part is that if you preorder you get the game at half price.

By the manner in which this game blew past $2 million, this will certainly be successful, and with some marketing muscle has a chance to be an extremely popular game once it releases (holiday 2017, they say)

I was actually shocked that Sony used E3 to promote a donation via Kickstarter.

Agreed, it just seems of or weird. And how could they fund Shenmue 3, which is part of a VERY ambitious seriers, on a budget of 2m? It is almost as if they aim to get paid for free marketing, but I hope it is legit.

No one's really asking you to fund the game. No one's holding a gun in front of your head and telling you to "donate". If you don't want to " donate" then don't "donate" and if a lot of people think that the gaming industry is better off without kickstarter campaigns then they will not "donate" and the industry will go back to normal.

Anyways in my opinion, I think the Shenmue 3 kickstarter is there mainly so that the guys making Shenmue 3 can bring it over to PC since they didn't want it to be a PlayStation exclusive .

they could but they dont want it, neither wants MS or Nintendo. But it would be awesome if sony decides in the end still donating the money to make it AAA quality 

I really understand kickstarter being used to already established developers that DOESN'T have any publisher or anything like that. I'm of course referring to Yooka-Laylee, Bloodstained and Mighty nr9 - but THIS? Sega OWNS that IP. Sega should be paying for this! Not the gamers. Soon enough, all the publishers have to do is pay for marketing and spend the necessery hours of developing the game, and the GAMERS will be doing the rest. We'll be paying for development and then BUY the game when it's complete. Wake up. This is just wrong

I don't know.. Seems to come off in poor taste if Sony doesn't want to fund it, but then use their conference to sort of treat it as their own and to have fans fund it instead of them.

If you pay for development, you will get the game at no additional cost.

Sega has no interests in wasting money for this project. They allow Yu Suzuki to make with the IP what he wants if he manages to get the money for a worthy sequel. Suzuki tried asking any source of money from all big 3  for the last decade or so, and this is what sony would wanted to do as we can see just a kickstarter promotion. 

I don't see this as a negative because I have been dying to see a lot of older franchises come back to life and this could very well be the way to do it.