Time for another Interesting Facts video! Today we'll be looking into Shenmue 3 and the previous games in the Shenmue series, as well as talking about the Kickstarter campaigns that funded the game, controversies surrounding it and possible HD remasters. Shenmue 3 is scheduled to release in December 2017, so we're still a long way off which means finding facts about this game is quite hard, let alone interesting ones! Hopefully more light will be shed on the third installment in the coming months.


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ABOUT THE GAME

Shenmue III is an upcoming action-adventure open-world video game directed by Yu Suzuki and developed by his company Ys Net. It is scheduled for release in December 2017 for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4. The third game in the main Shenmue series, Shenmue III follows teenage martial artist Ryo Hazuki in his quest to find his father's killer in 1980s China.

The previous two Shenmue games were directed by Suzuki, developed by Sega AM2 and published by Sega for the Dreamcast in 1999 and 2001 respectively. The original Shenmue was the most expensive video game ever developed at the time, with an estimated production and marketing cost of over $47 million USD, though this also covered some of Shenmue II and groundwork for future Shenmue games. Despite attracting positive reviews and a cult following, the games were commercial failures and Shenmue III spent over a decade in development hell.

At the June 2015 E3 conference, following years of speculation, Suzuki announced that Sega had licensed the Shenmue rights to Ys Net, and launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund Shenmue III. The campaign met its initial target of $2 million USD in under eight hours, making it the fastest Kickstarter campaign to reach that amount. It ended in July having raised over $6 million, making it the highest-funded video game and the sixth highest-funded campaign in Kickstarter history. Crowdfunding resumed via the online payment system PayPal and the Chinese crowdfunding platform Alipay.



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1 - The story of Shenmue is comprised of 11 chapters. The first game was considered chapter 1, then a manga was written to cover chapter 2, and the second game filled chapters 3, 4 and 5. This means Shenmue 3 will go from chapter 6, but it's still unknown where it'll end and even how many more games creator Yu Suzuki will be able to develop.

2 - Most of the game's funding has come from the crowdfunding website, Kickstarter. Initially asking for 2 million USD, the campaign quickly soared past this number. It took under 8 hours to reach this goal, and went on to be funded for a total of over 6 million USD by nearly 70,000 backers. While there are other companies besides Sony funding Shenmue 3 and probably for a lot more than 6 million USD, it's quite impressive that so many fans would come together and in such a short time raise a substantial amount of money like this.

3 - Yu Suzuki decided to use Unreal Engine 4 to develop Shenmue, stating -

"It was the portrayal of colors, the shaders and the rendering engine. They’re close to the image I have for the world of Shenmue III. Unreal Engine 4 allows me to portray what I think the humidity and the smell of the world should be. If you see a scene in the desert, you will feel the dry air of the desert. I feel that I can bring those abstract qualities of climate and atmosphere to life using Unreal Engine 4."

4 - There was some initial controversy surrounding backer rewards, particularly around the Slacker Backer campaign that was intended for people who were too late to fund the initial Kickstarter. While the developers Ys Net offer some cool rewards, apparently none of these would be available to anyone who backed the campaign via PayPal.

The decision was put up to vote as to whether PayPal backers could receive the rewards, with just over 15,000 people voting. 4009 voted against giving them rewards, 4670 voted for, and 6432 didn't care either way. Ys Net ended up going with the least voted for choice, angering and upsetting many fans. However they have since stated that there has been some miscommunication and all backers will receive the rewards available to each of their campaigns.

5 - Since the news about Shenmue 3 spread, there has been talk about Sega creating HD ports of the first two games. However this plan does come with a few problems, particularly with licensed products that can be found within Shenmue 1 and 2, such as those belonging to Coca Cola, Toshiba and so on. While this wasn't a problem when the games were initially made as they were promotional tie ins for different regions, the licenses to use said products will have expired by now, and so Sega will have to go about either trying to re-license them, or come up with their own fake brands specially for the game.

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