Future of Shenmue series after 2017

[Hanzumon]

There is one problem:

Sega has the rights about the complete story. They gave Suzuki the rights for a small part of the story for Shenmue 3.

If Shenmue 3 isn´t sucessfull, will sega give Suzuki the rights of the last part of the story to make Shenmue 4?

[Hyo Razuki]

Sega are getting a portion of S3's sales. It's basically free money for them, since they're not doing anything with the IP anyway. If S3 can sell well enough I can even see them straight up funding number 4 for YS Net or letting Yu develop it in-house, either as a full-fledged Sega employee or as a freelance director for S4.

And even if S3's not gonna do too well sales-wise, I could still see Sega giving Yu the license as long as they don't need to fund anything. They're not using the S4 IP, so why would they not make some money off it.