How any one doubted sony would have a contract in place given it was in their conference.?

It was pretty clear that since sony announced it that they're partners somehow in it. 

Glad to hear! Hopefully will obtain more information by TGS!

Given that they announced it at their conference, it's more likely that the deal was setup first, with the catch being getting the kickstarter funding.

I think the Kickstarter was used to gauge if people would be interested in the game. Sony Japan studio will probably help to make the game. I'm pretty sure they could use the PS4 Yakuza game engine for this game.

I acknowledge that, yes. Was a tad unclear before, due to the co-existence of a partnership with Sony and a kickstarter being pretty much incompatible in my comprehension. Makes no sense. Sony is a partner, yes? Why do they need help supporting the game?

Yea, yea. To gauge public interest. Well they could have held a survey, then.

Yeah, I'm curious but as I've not played the first 2 games I am unlikely to buy this unless I get a chance to play 1 and 2.

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.

They just wanted to squeeze some money out of the fans. That's it. And now that all of those people invested real money in the game, they will make sure to defend their decision and promote the game. Money!

I'm sure they wanted to see how badly people wanted the game. To test it under fire, I guess. Forum polls and internet surveys are not exactly accurate or represent gamers clearly.

I can see why some may dislike the way they played that out with using kickstarter but on the other hand, if other publishers used that method to test the market about reviving old series, we'd probably have more games like shenmue 3 being released.