Monkei wrote:So an exact amount of money came to your mind, which then accidentally happened to be one of the reward tiers? I'm sure most of us adjusted their donations according to the desired rewards. Surely a couple of people will have put an extra $50 on top without it having any effect on their rewards, but I doubt that happened too often. Did you do something like that?
What I'm saying is that the rewards totally had a huge effect on donations and that they matter, to some more than to others.
Sure, it would be great and much easier if people wouldn't feel cheated. But it's okay for them to feel like that, nobody can really tell them it's not. I don't feel like them, but I can relate. We're not all feeling the same about all of this, that's impossible with 70000 people.
Sure, AJ could have prepared at least something for Paypal, that would have been smart. But guys, come on. Most of you are overreacting to an extreme extent, always so quick to predict the world's end and get out the pitchforks and torchlights. It's just some slacker backer period, nothing really depends on it. It's not doing anything bad to Shenmue III. The main funding campaign has been over for months now. Please consider chilling the hell out for once.
I apologise if my earlier post has caused you any confusion but I assure you my pledge amount was not arbitrary. When I decided to support Shenmue 3 (this moment being the first nanosecond after the Kickstarter was announced) I resolved to give as much as I could afford. So basically, I gathered up what money I could without breaking the bank and then looked for the highest corresponding tier. Thanks to international exchange rates at the time I was not able to pledge as much as I would have liked when the campaign began. Nevertheless I did manage to pledge $830 USD, which qualified me for the $800 Shenmue Patron tier.
Of course, in revealing how much I pledged I only want to illustrate one single point – what I want is Shenmue 3 itself, the rest is just icing on the cake. This is not to diminish those who pledged less; or for me seethe enviously at those who could contribute much more. In the end the whole point of this campaign is to make Shenmue 3 a reality; as the successful funding of this game is not something that any of us could finance on our own. I mean, with Michael Jackson dead I can’t think of any high profile and eccentric Sega fans with the spare cash to make Shenmue 3 possible.
Honestly, when you get right down to it I find this whole reward tier mentality on crowdfunding to be something of a Faustian bargain. Even since a few high profile Kickstarters began offering tiered rewards everyone else is compelled to try and do the same, lest people perceive that Kickstarter as being somehow less worthy of support then those that offer complicated reward systems. Still, I do acknowledge that for a lot of people all these exclusive Shenmue rewards motivated them to pledge more. To that end, we must contend with this unexpected issue of offering more rewards to the PayPal backers.
It would be best if we could all navigate through this crisis without too much turmoil. With a bit of luck we might still be able to prevent this PR blunder from becoming a full-blown media shitstorm. Fortunately, most of the gaming media’s so called ‘journalists’ might still be on their Christmas holidays. We might just get through this yet.