We are at 3.75 mil with 3 weeks left to go.
That's because we got a huge boost at the beginning due to being advertised on an international stage at Sony's E3 press conference. We essentially started out of the gate with $2 million due to that. However outside of that we have been doing roughly 50% of what bloodstained achieved on a day to day basis. all the projections on Kicktraq now put us at 4 - 4.5 million.
Bloostained Shenmue 3
Day 7 $ 99667 $ 57244
Day 8 $ 84591 $ 44669
Day 9 $ 66261 $ 31074
Day 10 $ 49884 $ 25402
Day 11 $ 57399 $ 25293
A big push is coming on Friday with 30 on the 3rd, probably a lot more big investments with the next round of reward tiers, and of course the last minute bump. All in all it looks like Shenmue is on track to beat Bloodstained.
Bloodstained "last minute bump" was around 150k-200k (if you only take the last few days where the pledge amounts increased) and this was caused by aggressive social media work by the company managing the kickstarter and last minute panic pledging, why would people who have never played the previous two titles in a story heavy franchise panic pledge in the last few days? I think we will see a bump, but no where near as large as Bloodstained.
I also hope the fan led "pledge $30 on the 3rd" works, indeed I think it'll have the same affect the new tiers had yesterday, but even that only brought it in line with Bloodstained normal sustained daily pledge levels and only for one day due to the limited quantities available.
I hope you prove me wrong, I really do... I would love to "insert foot into mouth" on this occasion, but I'd be willing to bet actual cash we won't finish ahead of bloodstained.
Could the KS have been better, maybe. But it's doing relatively great and thus far there's nothing I can really pin on Awesome Japan as having done wrong. The twitch interview included which everyone is taking waaay to seriously. If there's a problem anywhere, its with the people on this forum and this thread in particular, who are being unsatisfiable and entitled cynical assholes who go around harassing and mocking undeserving people.
the whole point of a social media presence by a company tasked with 'promoting' is to encourage people to pledge/buy. Using a cheap camera, low quality microphone, not testing the setup before hand, not having images ready, not using the tools available within twitch to filter out questions and saying "meh going too fast, I give up" after 2 questions, all the while using an unprofessional (possibly high) interviewer isn't the way to do it, they even messed up the Reddit AMA and ended up splitting questions between two totally separate threads.
its not that people are being cynical or 'unsatisfiable' as you put it, its just people expect at least a minimum level of professionalism to put the whole kickstarter in a positive light, which is really needed considering how major media sites are being extremely toxic with misinformed click bait articles.
what I will say is we are getting Shenmue 3 and thats great and we owe it entirely to Sony, allowing Yu Suzuki onto the stage at E3, without that... I'm not entirely sure "Awesome Japan" would have breached 2.5 million yet.