Valascaziel wrote: Slacker Backer is ongoing. Deep Silver, I believe, has injected the funds he needed as he now states he can make the game we imagined.
The only other injection of funds would be if the publisher they are seeking for Japan puts anything into the pot as well, but that's up in the air.
Well actually, I don't think Deep Silver has gave him all the money that is required. In the thread titled "Yu Suzuki talks about Shenmue III and memories" there's some stuff that he says which indicates they still don't have all the money that they need. Here are a few quotes that prove this:
"Question 2 to Yu:
But still - Shenmue 3 has not the same budget as 1 or 2. What do you have to change in the game because of that?
Yu's answer:
The story is still intact but i had to adjust some of the extra elements and details. We talked about the 200 people in that village - maybe we will even have 400 in the end, i didn't decide yet. You have to remember that all the city / village residents in 1 & 2 had a "real" simulated life, thats a really complicated and tough quest and the budget for Shenmue 3 is probably not big enough to do that again.
Question 3 to Yu:
Will there be voices and sound for everything in the game?
Yu's answer:
We don't know yet. To tell the truth - the amount of text is getting bigger and bigger and not all of it is planned, so we don't know if all of it will be available with sound."
And the last quote: "We don't have any facial expressions in the game right now and none of the character models are final yet. So it will look different and better in the final game. The teaser is not representing the quality of the final game, we are still in the middle of developing. And of course you have to remember the budget. The budget is good enough for our game, but its pretty small if you compare it to other games right now. We can't keep up with big modern games. We would need a way bigger budget (ten times bigger than now) to make perfect modern graphics. So we need to find a good middle way between good graphics and good content. Please don't expect highend graphics, Shenmue 3 is not about that."