Shenmue 3’s Kickstarter has been funded

 

Shenmue 3 is Real

No more waiting. No more false hope. Shenmue 3 is alive, it’s coming, and one day we’re all going to get to play it. As of a few moments ago, Shenmue 3 reached its $2 million goal on Kickstarter, breaking all sorts of records along the way.

Shenmue 3 has become the fastest game on Kickstarter to break $1 million dollar and the fastest to reach a $2 million funding goal, hitting it in less than hours with more than 24,000 funders. The game’s funding moved so quickly in its opening hours that it practically broke the kickstarter page, hitting prospective funders with errors.  It’s also currently on track to outpace Bloodstained, which recently became Kickstarter’s most funded game ever at $5.5 million. For comparison, Bloodstained required 24 hours to reach half of Shenmue 3’s initial funding goal.

Of course, this is just the beginning. With more than 30 days left in the campaign, the project as more than $2 million worth of stretch goals lined up, ranging from Shenmue 1 & 2 cinema shorts at $2.5 million to an expanded Baisha village and additional mini games at $4 million. According to the Kickstarter page, we’ll be hearing more about these stretch goals after initial funding. We’ll post more details as they come in!

Shenmue 3 is being developed by Yu Suzuki’s independent studio YsNet. It is currently unknown how (or if) SEGA is involved, and whether any outside parties are will be performing publish duties or providing outside funding. The game is currently scheduled for a December 2017 release. For additional information on the project and its developers, check out the official kickstarter page and the game’s website. For a look at a list of all the known stretch goals, check out the image below the break!

SEGA making Virtua Fighter social game, Yu Suzuki’s studio to oversee development


SEGA has announced that they are making a social adaptation of the Virtua Fighting games on the popular Mobage platform. The game was announced as being called Virtua Fighter Cool Champ. Yes, I’m not making that up. Its called “Cool Champ”.

This Virtua Fighter spin off is going to be a card battling game that will feature characters and elements from the series. You can build up your character and fight against rivals. The game is being published by Epics and Yu Suzuki’s Ys Net Studio will be supervising them, along with SEGA who will supervise the project as a whole.

If you are a Mobage member, you will have access to the game on your phone… today! That’s right, are you a cool enough dude?

  

Shenmue World is now dead [edit]


Even though we all wanted to play Shenmue City or Shenmue World (whatever you want to call it), it seems we won’t get the chance. According to Ysnet, the official developer for Shenmue Gai (the Japanese name of the game) has said that the game will cease to exist. No more updates, no more support. The site has a thank you message to all the users that played it.

This is pretty bad news for the Shenmue franchise and for hopefuls that this would lead to Shenmue III.

[Edit] It seems that this was already discussed by Yu Suzuki in an interview. Basically they are closing the mobile version of the game, but they are going to launch a ‘smart phone’ version for devices like Android and iOS.[/Edit]