They didn't reach a much higher goal because they run this kickstarter campaing like shit. I followed a lot of projects on kickstarter and this was one of the most stupidly managed i ever seen. If you look at other kickstarter record holders like tim shafer game you'll see they constanrtly updated backers with new videos or post. And the best kickstarter campaign of all time was clearly bloodstained, they have given small rewards even for retweets and facebook likes, so they had a lot of free publicity.

What did they for this shenmue 3 project? They showed up with a crazy bad video on e3, and that's it. They can thank sony for tge visibility they had, and also the crazy amount of gaming news that talked about the project all this june, for the money they reached till now. But they surely did everything in their power to let this game fail. Shame on you shenmue devs.

While they didn't run the campaign as smartly as a lot of other people did and probably loose a lot of positive buzz because of that, they were ironically really hurt by their association with sony.
All those reports coming out, telling people to stop funding the game and that sony would pick up the slack anyways, made people suspicious and apathetic towards the kickstarter.
Also the stretchgoals seem kind of unverwhelming and incomprehensive, as well as too far spaced out from each other to really be an incentive. All these 'battle system expanded' ones seem nice enough, but for someone who isn't familiar with the shenmue battle system in the first place that doesn't really say anything and isn't as exciting as say, 'new city district added - you can now explore the harbour' or something...

Release: 2018.

At the earliest, as it says on the KS page: "estimated delivery date: December 2017".

I don't want to sound too negative, I'm glad for people who had been hoping for this announcement for years, but after KS funding is closed the real wait begins.

I wouldn't be surprised if this game comes out only in 2019 or 2020 (we had quite a few kickstarted projects before which took at least one year more than originally estimated by the developers, e.g. Tim Schafer's Broken Age).

I have a bad feeling about this game... Don't know if it is the messy campaign or the low quality videos, but I keep thinking this is gonna disappoint a lot of people. Hope I'm wrong haha

PS4 should have had a physical option from the start. It could've gotten at least 500k more just from that. And other than that, yes, the campaign was terribly run. Like hands down horrible.

About to pass that videogame record

Very worrying considering if you have 20 staff earning $500 a week - $520,000 per year or $1,300,000 over 2.5 years... and that is just for 20 staff to work on it, considering Kickstarter Site takes a 5% cut I believe from the end amount and 5% goes to the people envolved in collecting the money... Talking about a large chunk gone out of that money already, and that is not even considering renting an office or electricity/PCs to work on the game lol.

Will definately need an injection of Money from someone down the line as it draws closer to time to buy some disks to ship this on.

Is that the standard wage for the staff in Japan or the US?

I'm pretty disappointed with the whole thing. KS campaign was mismanaged and felt rushed and the whole way Shenmue 3 was announced was a letdown for me and probably the worst possible way to announce it IMO.