News Shenmue 3 Kickstarter Wraps Up With $6,333,295

The problem is that it was around the time of the PS that gaming started to change from 'gamers hiding in their rooms/dens' to becoming mass media marketed, front room entertainment boxes for the whole family. Sony saw this shift (or even created it?) and developed it even further with the PS2... PS2 sponsored EVERYTHING from local skate parks to Champions League football on ITV.

Whereas the PS/PS2 went massively mainstream, the Dreamcast from Sega was developed in a different manner. Sega threw money in to developing graphically impressive games (MSR), games that were radically different (Jet Set Radio) and also the potential 'game changers' such as Shenmue.

The problem was that these games took so long in coming (wasn't Shenmue originally delayed by 9-12 months?) and cost so much to develop that it restricted their investments in to other areas and so the mass market games of the time (Tony Hawk's Pro Skater) were either very late in coming (THPS was released on the DC some 9 months after it's initial release on the PS) or just didn't arrive at all leaving the game catalogue much smaller for the DC and again, as such there was a much smaller customer base to buy the DC's games.

Times have moved on but the way gaming is now is even worse for the 'game changer' style of games as people have moved away from the character based games and are now only interested in 'blasting the C@#P out of either each other (alla CoD or BF) or multitudes of zombies. Even the likes of the very best and most popular character based/adventure/horror games such as Silent Hills, Resident Evil and Tomb Raider have all suffered over recent years with reboots that have failed to wow the intended market.

A new version of Shenmue will fail. Not because it is a Kickstarter project and not even because it is a bad game, even a great version of Shenmue will fail, although going by story based games of recent years it will indeed suck at what it is supposed to do... it's just the current market for games isn't based on that type of game and so the game will take masses of money to develop with only a small target market...

 

Not necxessarily true: the PC 'space sim' genre has been effectively dead for a decade, but it has been soundly demonstrated in the last year or two that the demand is still MASSIVE. "Nobody is making X games" is in no way an indicator of target market size.

 

Again plenty of Yakuza titles about now that do what Shenmue did but better, so Shenmue is hardly a game changer or a sole game of its type.

 

CIG and Star Citizen got massive funding because of who the lead developer was so to say big business should not use kick starter is a bit nuts. People were more inclined to believe his vision as he has a proven track record.

Similar story with this game. The only real difference one declined external funding and one didn't.