Let's have a look:
- Project started without a description of what Shenmue is. Later featured a still somewhat crudely made fan video as a fix.
- The Kickstarter Trailer - even though in early production failed to communicate what the series was about or excite anyone that wasn't already fan
- The Kickstarter Trailer featured a main character that was unrecognizable to the fans.
- Banners used neon colored dropshadows and looked extremely crude.
- The Website (shenmue.info) is an unusable mess, without any significant content.
- The initial reward structure was heavily flawed (with huge gaps between significant pledge points.)
- The final reward structure is heavily flawed with far too many entries, which created more confusion in the end.
- Adding additional rewards using the same Kickstarter account was impossible to the end despite the community pleading for add-ons.
- None of the Kickstarter Goals ever got explained on Kickstarter - which again posed a problem for more casual backers.
- There was no communication regarding building momentum to reach a certain goal, and no communication congratulating the community on having reached a certain goals at times.
- Instead what we got as "information" we had to aggregate between a Famitsu interview, a Reddit AMA and a Faq - ourselves, project management didn't.
- The AMA on Reddit was botched with the management misplacing an account password, or not setting up analytics properly, or not authenticating the account with reddits AMA team (probably) and having to switch reddit threads mid conversation.
- After concentrated confusion about what the backing goals where the Kickstarter Team released the entire list as a whole - without contextualizing the goals.
- In the first few days they managed to produce the rumor, that the project was mainly funded by Sony, then did not react to it. The rumor then got picked up by internet media.
- When everyone was complaining about their lackluster reward structure, they added very limited high roller rewards as a reaction, which mostly sold out within a day - producing some resentment in the process.
- Funding goals sometimes got checked off hours after they were reached - without any comments.
- Produced video interviews, which first were hosted on Kickstarter - but then switched to youtube - hosting two versions of each and every one of them at all times - splitting the audience. We had to rey on the Dojo to provide is subtitled videos.
- The first twitch stream "for the fans" was a -likeable- disaster, featuring an odd mix of QVC presentation, scripted Q&A, reading out loud FAQ questions instead of posting them on the site, and failing to read a chat - also the video quality was abysmal - because they hadn't bothered testing the equipment
- Halfway through the Kickstarter they introduced a Poll for reward tiers - which went live with half the price brackets (which its main purpose in gauging the audience) missing.
- To get participation they bundled it with a "who is your favorite character" poll - which was so useless, they gladly featured it in a 30 Minute segment within the celebration stream - one week after they released the results to the public anyhow.
- The celebration stream began late "because of technical difficulties", then featured a 20 minute echo fest after one of the translators (one of which had a really hard time at producing english sentences), or one of the segment producers, presumably took off their headphones and turned on their speakers.
- The celebration stream then cut out because of a "power outage".
- The celebration stream then came back on late, because of a computer failure after the power outage.
- Once the celebration stream was back - they couldn't get the audio to play on both the fan reaction segment and the fan videos segment - but went through with them anyhow.
- During the celebration stream, which they said multiple times, was set in their "studio" - there was a nice interlude of construction site soundbits - while the video sound wasn't working for them, so at least there was some atmosphere they could talk over...
- They announced paypal in a half sentence somewhere in the last third of awful celebration Twitch stream - but made sure, that it WAS NOT UP, when all the "New video game record on Kickstarter" and "Shenmue Kickstarter finished" news articles went up. In fact it isn't even up as we speak.
- No updates reacting to the Kickstarter finishing. At all - much less in this record breaking way.
Now the campaign was successful in spite of AJ's all around awfulness. The fans stood up and got it done but no matter how proud I am of the community, as a huge Shenmue fan I want to see the series reach it's full potential. These errors ensured that money was left on the table and we were not able to maximize the momentum and goodwill of the fans.
Shenmue 3 is trending on Twitter right now. Are they capitalizing on this with post-funding Paypal options. NO! And we may not see an update until Tuesday. In the world of the internet this isn't acceptable.
Suzuki, Cedric and co do also need to take a share of the blame. After all they selected AJ and frankly should have held them to much higher standards.