Alright then, if you want me to assume the mantle of Captain Obvious...


Man, I'm sorry, but that yellow makes this hard to read. Glad it's not like that in the editor. I thought I'd give my thoughts on these obvious ideas.

- YSNet should've spent more time on creating a short demo, not just Shenhua's poor attempt at a Blue Steel and jumping over a stream. Also, setting it in the cave would've been a bit more poignant. Give non-Shenmue fans a reason to pledge their hard-earned money, don't just expect them to.

I don't necessarily disagree, but you have no idea what kind of cost restraints they faced. With no money and little time, your expectation here (and elsewhere) might be a touch unrealistic. I could be wrong, but you should consider that everything they had might have been produced under very considerable constraints.

- To build on the previous point, the Kickstarter has done as well as it has solely based on the fact that it's Shenmue III. Finally. If Half-Life 3 or Timesplitters 3 also had to take to the site, then they also would've had non-fans donate money. It's an event, a milestone in gaming.

Agree 100%. Valve is a corporation with a couple billion in equity, and plenty of cash to spend. They would have done a great job, had a sweet demo, and some great marketing. Of course, they're a corporation with a couple billion in equity, so they wouldn't have to turn to kickstarter.

- Shenmue III was a big announcement, and it reached almost everyone who's into video games enough to know what E3 is. Awesome Japan should've realised this, and made plans to maintain momentum. The third will obviously lead to a temporary spike, and historical data points to the probability that it'll also see a big increase in the last few days, but they seem to be overly reliant on this.

You can't maintain momentum. Kickstarters spike, that's what they do. Pretty common with media. Jurrassic World's box office draw has been amazing, but its second weekend was like $100 million less than the first. The rabid fans contribute early, and there will be a spike right before it ends. You can't carry momentum all the way through. This, too, is an unrealistic expectation held by a fan. It would be awesome to see, but it's not a desire based on reality.


- One of the ways they could've done this was through a meta game. Don't expect fans to do the work for you. They should've approached it in a way that sees the fans constantly struggling to decide how much more they should pledge by adding a new tier or two every three to five days. Now, that may be the case of course, but their focus really needs to be on none-fans.

Pretty unrealistic, again, to expect non-fans to contribute significant amounts of money for a game they're going to have to wait 2.5 years for, when they don't even have a viable way to play the first 2. And don't say Emulators/buy a Dreamcast, how many non-fans are going to do that? If you think the number is large, I have a great bridge to sell you.

- It's great that they're trying to engage with the fans through polls, the Reddit AMA, etc., but why the hell are they not hammering out interviews with large media sites left, right and centre? They're already guaranteed our money, stop using us as a damn crutch, get out there and do some bleedin work!

They've been on Polygon, Engadget and some other pretty mainstream news sites. I guess they could do a bunch of different interviews that result in the same information being on those sites, but I don't think it would help very much. And I don't think they're going to get a "Daily Show" invite any time soon.

- I understand Suzuki setting the initial total at $2m. It's great that he said "no, I want them to have Shenmue III even if it's just a short game", but this should've been made clear from the very beginning. You had the stage at E3 ffs. Sony's stage. You had the biggest audience of next gen console gamers right in front of you. You should've bleedin said something!

Fair, and Yu seems to agree and has said as much. It was a mistake.

- The transparency issue. Almost everyone who knows of Shenmue knows about the whole fiasco behind the budget. This should've been addressed in the Kickstarter video. "We were given a huge budget to develop this game, as we had to create technology that didn't exist, we made it extremely detailed, individual footstep sounds, 3D scanners, meteorological data, it was split into two games, shit was more expensive back then, etc." Drive that point home, compare to how things have changed. Explain that Sony has advertising handled, so 100% of the Kickstarter funds make up the entirety of the game's actual production budget.

I never expected this to be an issue. Hindsight is 20/20, but they did say right from the start it was going to use the Unreal engine. Big time savings there. People just didn't realize that, and people love a good conspiracy story. With hindsight, they might have done something different here, but I bet you weren't thinking that on the first night, either.

- Simplified stretch goals. Why give the subtitles individual tiers? Just say "$3.5m gets all this", "$5m gets all that". The big leaps looks better value for money because of the sheer amount of content packed into each one.

Finally a point I actually agree with you on. Their stretch goals were dumb at first, and are only a little better now. That said, I still don't think it makes a difference. People were going to donate or they weren't. With good marketing now, there will be another spike at the end, and this will be the most well funded video game to date through Kickstarter. Hard to say they were bumbling fools that didn't know what they were doing if they make more money than anyone else had through the medium.

Back to the original point, I don't think it will/would impact money raised, but I was scratching my head at the goals, nonetheless.

- Replica jackets and mirrors should've definitely been in there from the start. Oh, you want both a Dragon and a Phoenix Mirror? Here's a new reward tier for that!

Well, they added them, so why be bitter now?

- For all the years Suzuki has had to design this game in his spare time (which apparently he has), he seems awfully unsure about a lot of things. This says to me that it's still in pre-production. He should've come into this with a very clear view on what he wants to include, and more importantly, how to implement it. Any other bells and whistles can be voted on by the backers, sure, but the core elements of the game? C'mon san.

I am not sure that he didn't, but he could communicate this a bit better, I agree. I mean, we're the kind-sorta investors, after all.

- Shenmue is an Eastern franchise. It's very Japanese. Whatever. That doesn't mean that you market it to a Western audience via an Eastern-based promotional company. The decision to do this is a massive oversight and terribly naïve.

Fair.

- Little to no presence. They appear on Kickstarter's most popular. Yu Suzuki and Shenmue III are on Twitter. The game has a website. These are all the places they're expected to be, and that's good, but why the hell haven't they branched out? Okay, sure, this one's a little tricky, but there should have been agreements made with both Sony and SEGA to throw in a little bit more of an extra presence. Facebook ads, banner ads, cross-promotion, etc. Right now it seems like only the fans, Corsi and Boyes are the only ones who give a shit.

ROI, the fans are the people that are going to pay. You could fork out TONS of money and lose it because if you aren't a fan, you aren't donating to the Kickstarter. Period. You're dreaming if you think otherwise

- The blatant potential of bad publicity... that was fulfilled. How the hell did they not see any of this coming? Kickstarter as a platform's been under a lot of scrutiny since before the campaign was launched. Why was nothing done to subvert this? Where were the contingency plans? The PR team's fucking useless.

Not sure they have a PR team, I doubt they could afford it. Or they wouldn't have to go to Kickstarter. And Sony wasn't about to drop a ton of money before they saw there was real potential here. So now they've stepped in, and there's cleanup being done. I still think you're benefiting from hindsight a touch here.

- Less of the corporate responses. Every reply to fan questions so far say nothing. Either answer properly or don't fucking answer at all.

Now you want it both ways. You want a PR team, but you don't want corporate responses. What do you think you get from a PR team?

Been a while since I've posted, but I'm back to combat what I see as EXTREMELY unrealistic expectations from what has been a loud, but TINY group for the last 14 years. Sega tried this shit, and it sold pretty well, but for a dying system. Then Microsoft put money in to it, and didn't get a good ROI. Now people think that it should be a AAA title 14 years later, with some demo made out of thin air, and a corporate marketing and PR team behind it. Gotta get real on this. It wasn't going to happen.

Related to that, your "I'd wait until 2020 for the 'right' game," is an odd mantra. We can't know the counter-factual, but I can promise you that, as you drift even further from the original's launch date, you aren't going to suddenly get MORE invested in it. I am pretty shocked we're getting anything. Wait until 2020 and the Kickstarter would probably do worse, and Sony probably wouldn't be marketing it, and some shell of a company would be developing it for a phone.