Yu Suzuki's Shenmue 3 has just managed to break a record, becoming the highest crowd funded video game on the Kickstarter platform. The game has accrued more than $5,553,470, just beating out Koji Igarashi's igavania crowd-funding campaign for his spiritual successor to Castlevania called Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.
Gamespot did a bit of numerical comparisons between various Kickstarter projects and how much the crowd-funding heavy hitters have pulled in since Kickstarter's inception.
Igarashi's Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night managed $5,545,991, but Suzuki's Shenmue 3 managed to beat it by just barely $10 thousand.
Suzuki's Shenmue 3 could potentially end up making just a bit more as a final push before the whole thing ends (as of the writing of this article it still has about a few hours left on the clock). As mentioned over on Kickstarter update page, the team will be live-streaming the countdown to the finale of the game's crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter...
Yu Suzuki will be joined with the Shenmue 3 project members in a special live broadcast to count down the final hours as the Kickstarter project comes to a close. Scheduled to make an appearance are animation producer Hiroaki Takeuchi and main character designer Kenji Miyawaki.
Shenmue 3 might be the top video game crowd-funding initiative on Kickstarter, but as pointed out by Gamespot, the game ranks behind other projects like the Veronica Mars Movie, the Ouya and Exploding Kittens, amongst other projects such as Pebble Time, which managed to rack up $20 million in crowd-funding.
Although, to be fair none of those projects compare to the ultimate crowd-funding campaign known as Star Citizen, which managed more than $86 million in crowd-funding as Chris Roberts and the crew at Roberts Space Industries and Cloud Imperium Games are hoping to make the biggest, most taxing, all-expansive space simulator ever conceived. The game has had its fair share of criticism and setbacks, but it just goes to show you that die-hard fans will throw all sorts of money at the screen to see a dream game come true.
In the case, of Shenmue 3 I think the game did magnificent on the Kickstarter front, bringing in $5 million on a goal initially set at $2 million.
The game incurred a few roadblocks in the media when people questioned Sony's involvement with the game after they initially unveiled it on their stage during their E3 2015 press conference. It was one of the few games that were always highly requested but no one expected to actually see the game ever get made.
Shenmue 3 managed to share a stage with The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy VII Remake, making it one of the big three games that most people envisioned as vapor-titles. However, it looks like Suzuki's game has managed to hit all the necessary goals for becoming a real game, even if it didn't manage the $10 million mark that the creator had so desperately wanted to bring the “full vision” of Shenmue 3 to life.
On the upside, it was revealed that there are some secret investors putting some dimes and dollars into the project and so hopefully we'll see a fully realized version of the game when it finally does get released.
