Shibiryo wrote: What I've always wondered is why this game is actually so niche. Nobody really cares about Shenmue the way we do and's hard to get new fans. Like all scientific things, there's a reason but its so unknown to us. If only we were alot bigger and had so many youngsters jizzing up Shenmue then mabye we'd get some big bucks for Yu but games have without a doubt changed so then the little things get pushed aside. What I'm really talking about here is Shenmue (as a whole)and why the hell it's always been small in popularity and the mass audience/media/shenmue haters whatever you wanna call it keep messing us up? Is it because it imitates other games around or is it simply because its like nothing else and the fans are resilient as fuck?
south carmain wrote: I wouldn't call it niche. It's somewhere in the middle in terms of popularity which was an issue due to its huge budget and expectations at the time.
Chaikilla wrote: 10.6 Million dreamcasts sold worldwide, an estimated 1.2m copies of Shenmue 1 were sold. That's a good conversion rate. The dreamcast was in its coffin by the time Shenmue 2 was released on the dc (late 2001 in Europe, no dc release of s2 in NA) the system was dead and buried. I was a hardcore fan of the series after Shenmue 1 and I can remember only coming across finding a copy of 2 in store by chance, I didn't even know the game was out at the time. There were no advertisements that I could remember.
When Shenmue 2 came out on the Xbox a year later, again, there was very little advertisement of the game and Europeans had no real reason to re-purchase the game if they had already bought it on dreamcast a year earlier. Then you have to take into account that the original Xbox wasn't selling particularly well at the time itself. Another crucial error was the decision to not re-release Shenmue along with Shenmue 2 on the Xbox, I'd assume that this isolated many potential newcomers to the series.
I honestly think that the reason the Shenmue series didn't become mass market was largely down to the games being on consoles that sold poorly at the time. Along with some bad marketing decisions.
Chaikilla wrote: 10.6 Million dreamcasts sold worldwide, an estimated 1.2m copies of Shenmue 1 were sold. That's a good conversion rate. The dreamcast was in its coffin by the time Shenmue 2 was released on the dc (late 2001 in Europe, no dc release of s2 in NA) the system was dead and buried. I was a hardcore fan of the series after Shenmue 1 and I can remember only coming across finding a copy of 2 in store by chance, I didn't even know the game was out at the time. There were no advertisements that I could remember.
When Shenmue 2 came out on the Xbox a year later, again, there was very little advertisement of the game and Europeans had no real reason to re-purchase the game if they had already bought it on dreamcast a year earlier. Then you have to take into account that the original Xbox wasn't selling particularly well at the time itself. Another crucial error was the decision to not re-release Shenmue along with Shenmue 2 on the Xbox, I'd assume that this isolated many potential newcomers to the series.
I honestly think that the reason the Shenmue series didn't become mass market was largely down to the games being on consoles that sold poorly at the time. Along with some bad marketing decisions.
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