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!
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Little correction, if you don’t mind me saying. The article implies that Shenmue III will be the conclusion, but there are many more chapters planned in the series that are unlikely to be crammed into the one game.
This is amazing but I am slightly concerned. Part of the reason I love the game was because it was so far ahead of its time. Now the tech demo looked ok (Character models aside) but this will hardly push the boundaries. The other thing is that so far SEGA have zero involvement. Does this mean we will see no Sonic or NiGHTS capsules? No quirky SEGA references and no classic SEGA arcade games like Hang On. Lots of unanswered questions and hopefully given the 9 hour time to reach its initial target YS will revel more details very quickly…
The second thing is I feel a touch of fan exploitation here. Its big enough to be a SONY press conference headline. Obviously SONY is providing some sort of backing. Perhaps lending graphics technologies or sound studios? Perhaps financial? But lets face it, Shenmue has a small (Maybe around 100,000) group of passionate fans (Myself included). I have frequently said I’d pay £200 for Shenmue, is this simply clever marketing to extract more cash from this small group (I personally donated $300) who would otherwise just buy the game.
Still, the game is being made. This is amazing!!!!
I think Sony has zero involvement, outside of promoting it on the press event.
Quote from Adam Boyes “This is very much their project”.
I have to agree with SegaFan. Whilst this is incredible news, there are lots of unanswered questions surrounding this and to what extent (if any) SEGA are involved. I would love to see the return of the arcade games and those subtle nods to SEGA’s rich heritage.
Either way I guess, this is great news and sky-rocketed my E3 interest. $300 pledged!
If Sega’s not involved, it wont really be a true Sega game the way we remembered it, and if it’s not a Sega game, it will maybe be too generic these days, still, at least it’ll do it’s purpose by revealing the rest of the series story. And it was done without Sega, it’s so sad to see how Sega’s become, look at this, the day Shenmue is put on a crowd funding platform, it vastly exceeds it’s targets in less than 24hrs, and Sega was sitting on it doing nothing for 14 years believing it’d never be a success again. It’s no wonder Sega ended up in the state they are in now with their mismanagement, maybe this will change their mind in the future on certain IP that fan have been asking for for years. Shenmue has even broke the site in traffic, it’s breaking all sorts of records, it’s not the fastest funded videogame in history and the second fasted funded kickstarter project in history of all media incl videogames.
Sales wise Shenmue was never a success in the first place and that’s why Sega kept sitting on it. I mean, did the first game even break even for all that the production values cost? I doubt it. Just to remind you, I’m not jabbing at the game’s quality, but it’s appeal to consumer of yesteryear and today.
According to the Kickstarter page’s Q&A section, it looks like SEGA’s not involved with development, but has given them the go ahead to use the Shenmue licence going forward.
*Still excellent news all around, the arrangement will probably end up similarly to how Bayonetta 2 did – that game would have never even happened without non-Sega voting, same as Shenmue 3, Yu Suzuki had to seperate it from direct Sega involvement in order to even make it a reality.
@SOUP – That’s right. SEGA has given permission, but I wonder how far that permission goes. Wouldn’t it be awesome if rather than a Saturn under the TV, this time there was a SEGA Dreamcast. I can answer one of my queries after re-reading the Kickstarter. the graphics are Unreal 4. This is free and EPIC take 5% of the games taking over $3,000. If you think the DC version was written in assembly code on the Saturn and then again and totally retextured on the DC that will help with costs. On top of that I would imagine a lot of the orchestral score will be reused, the story has been written for 15 years and all the research was done but still I believe 2m to be a serious squeeze to build the base game. They need to stick to many of the principles of the original and I think the demo does that. Whilst the world was big it was made of a lot of detailed intimate settings and that seems to be the focus here. It also stays true by keeping some of the magic. Grabbing a leaf, arm wresting, getting a job… All added to the feel of the game. I like the fact that the demo simply had Ryo hopping across rocks and wasn’t tempted to try and be more explosive.
wow! i put my money up first thing last night! = ) absolutely amazing!
Guys please fund the game and make difference
DO IT!!!!!!
2.5 mill allready
Make history. So that shenmue will hit 20 mill. Tell your friends and mothers and fathers
Almost at 3 mill. I increased my pledge. Sega should be awefully ashamed. I dont even consider myself a sega fan no more.
Yu suzuki must have fought a long way to just get his podium on e3. And thats all he needed. Even the proof of concept wasnt necessary. All hr needed was 5 minutes on the podium and us as backers for this cause. Perhaps we should consider guys like yu suzuki. And that dude that is making rodea soldier as the real sega and we should ignore the existance of the ceo leechers at sega.
3 mil guys