In all the excitement at the announcement of the long-awaited Shenmue 3, a lot of people missed the fact that its Kickstarter campaign goal was a very modest $2 million. Was that really enough for a continuation of the franchise that fans had been craving for years? Would Sony or another partner be stumping up some cash of their own?
Fortunately, series creator Yu Suzuki, who’s heading development on the third game, has popped up to answer some of the questions surrounding the project’s funding.
”While it is not business practice to discuss the specific details of such arrangements,” Suzuki writes, ”I can say that with their (Sony and Shibuya Productions) assistance on the production and marketing end, and in Sony’s case with some publishing support as well, Ys Net is able to use more of the money we collect through Kickstarter purely for Shenmue 3’s development.”
That means that the entirety of the Kickstarter funding is going straight to developer Ys Net: ”Sony and Shibuya Productions are not seeing a cent of your Kickstarter dollars”, confirms Suzuki. It also means that reports predicting that Sony would pump cash into Shenmue 3, regardless of whether it earned enough through the campaign, would appear to be untrue.
Shenmue 3 has currently raised $3,625,530 via Kickstarter, from its initial $2,000,000 goal. There’s another 23 days left to go on the campaign.
