The long overdue Shenmue III racked up over US$6.3 million on Kickstarter. That’s a new record for video-game crowdfunding.
The previous record was held by Koji Igarashi’s Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night at $US5.5 million.
The Kickstarter campaign was announced at Sony’s E3 press conference with a $US2 million target. The game reached that goal in eight hours, making it the fastest Kickstarter to do so.
Sega released the first Shenmue title in 1999 in Japan and a sequel followed in 2001. Fans have been waiting a long, long time for a third title. Sega gave Yu Suzuki the Shenmue licence, because as the Shenmue creator told Kotaku, the company “felt safe” giving it to him.
As Kotaku previously reported, Sony is pitching in to bring Shenmue III to life. So are the fans who shelled out over six million bucks.
Comments
10 responses to “Shenmue III Breaks Video Game Kickstarter Record”
Star citizen is north of $85mil
But I think it only raised like 3ish mil on kickstarter
Be interesting to see what percentage of the total funding the Kickstarter represents. $6.3 million doesn’t seem like a lot of money for game development nowadays.
That money was just a front. Sony is helping to fund this game
Meanwhile the Mega Man Legends spiritual sequel Red Ash is breaking records of it’s own. Granted they’re not records for anything good. =(
I understand that the rest of the funding is made up from Sony, Sega et al, so what can $6.3 million do for the overall production and development of Shenmue 3? Probably not much, right?
Virtually nothing. It’s basically to prove to Sony that the project was worth even considering
Yep, which has pretty much been proven for Sony more than 3 times the initial target.
December 2017 seems so far away. 🙁
Meh, I’m gonna wait until 2019 to buy it (pc or ps4 version, which ever one is cheapest) from gumtree or elsewhere to get it on the cheap
It’s basically 66,000 preorders at 93 $US each – which I’m guessing is way more than the special editions of AAA games make. The actual budget will be 10-20x as much, so only 5-10% covered.
They said the kickstarter was to test interest, but it should have been obvious to anyone that it was going to be a success.
While I think Kickstarter is for suckers, I’m happy to be a scab and enjoy a new Shenmue!
Now I just want an Xbone version and re-releases (hopefully in HD) or BC versions of the first 2.
Sony are pretty heavily involved so I’m guessing there won’t be an XBOX One version of Shenmue III. I suppose with the new streaming options you could set it up so that you’re playing your PC version on the XBOX One.
Ys Net scored the license to make Shenmue III but they have no say in re-makes or re-releases of the original games. The popularity of the Kickstarter campaign may have been enough to knock them out of that dead zone they’ve been stuck in, but there’s really no telling what SEGA will do there.
is anyone really surprised? it’s not hard to drum up interest when you have an E3 announcement for your kickstarter, and not in some dark corner of the event either. I’d be interested to see what it would have gotten without that.
either way, it’s nice to see people getting a game they’ve wanted, although I still question whether or not the kickstarter was a necessary proof of concept and not just Sony hoping to milk a little extra cash flow before development even started.