So what about salaries and living costs compared to Finland? The consumer price index and rent index of Japan and Finland are quite similar, so the salaries shouldn't be that different:

• http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Japan
• http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?country=Finland

"Dreamfall Chapters" of Red Thread Games feels quite similar to the Shenmue games (except the fighting system of course) and they already finished 3 of the 5 episodes for less than 2 million dollars.

They use Unity instead of the Unreal Engine 4, but both engines are a solid basis (with great tools to help developers) for an "open world-ish" third person game with big areas and some population. Shenmue 3 has already triple of their budget, so i ain't worried that they can deliver a good game with that money... and until Shenmue 3 gets released, more money will be added (slacker backers by PayPal, preorders on Steam and PSN...)

I don't think funding is an issue. Those that backed the game obviously funded a good preportion of it but I suspect the company publishing the game for normal retail will also add in money to the pot. Probably had to pay a few million to secure the rights and then pay royalties on the number sold. The important thing is Shenmue 3 exists because a huge chunk of development costs were funded by kickstarter backers.

As for development costs I would of thought using an off the shelf development environment would massively reduce those costs. Shenmue is no longer cutting edge and Sega had to write its own development tools but not here. There may be existing resources from the earlier game that will be improved and re-used for Shenmue 3.

All in all its looks to be in a very healthy financial position for developing this game which I think is the most important thing of all.

Yep. And the engine they developed for the Saturn game was infuckingcredible.  Better than anything on the PS1 and rivals some of the better N64 stuff. 

Aye, todays engines are obviously far more advanced, but specifically with materials and such, so it's unlikely they'd need to hire the legion of people they did for the first game, which will cut costs dramatically.

Motioncapturing also got much cheaper and easier over the decades.

I believe they're just using unreal 4.

I wish they'd remaster the first 2 games,as I've never played them. If they did that,then I'd be more hyped about the third one. That would be a smart move in my opinion,but I don't think sega is that smart.

Yeah, but it gives them a much much better starting point, was what I was saying.  Meant to say Unreal 4, though. 

Buy a Dreamcast for like 50 bucks.  Buy a 100 pack of blank CDRs.  Play every Dreamcast game ever made. DC games are stupid easy to pirate. 

That was so dumb to make a system where you could burn the games so easily. Killed them.

6M isn't going to do shit for Shenmue. 10 was a pipe dream in that amount of time anyway.