Shenmue 3 is Kickstarted... Again

The Shenmue Kickstarter was a smashing success by nearly all metrics--it raised two million dollars in just a few hours, and despite the fact it was being backed by Sony and was announced at E3, people’s cynicism lost out to their burning, driving hunger for Shenmue 3. It became the most successful Kickstarter ever, raising over six million dollars, triple the two million being asked. As far as crowdfunding success stories go, I think it’s only topped by Star Citizen.

That said, note what i said above: NEARLY all Metrics. Because there was one party who was dissatisfied with the results of the Kickstarter… the developer itself, YS Net. While the kickstarter stated its goal was 2 million--which is normally a ludichrist amount to ask for a game over crowdfunding--they not-so-secretly were shooting for ten million, or a small fraction of how much a standard triple-A game costs to develop.

Well, they never got that far, obviously, but that doesn’t mean they can’t try again. So that’s exactly what they’re doing--introducing the "Slacker Backer," a chance for people to back Shenmue 3, either again or for the first time, to boost those numbers up even further.

The Slacker Backer pretty much works exactly the same way as the first Kickstarter, except it’s there to give people the chance to push the game to reach all its stretch goals, rather than actually fund the game. Or, directly from the FAQ:

This additional campaign comes as a response to all of the requests we have received asking for another opportunity to participate in the making of Shenmue III because either of a lack of payment options on Kickstarter, or just not having a chance to pledge before the campaign ended.

While the full game will be completed as promised with the use of the funding collected on Kickstarter, any additional funding collected here will go towards reaching the Stretch Goals to make the game even bigger and deeper.

Anyway, the Slacker Backer goes for a little over three months, and has currently raised a few hundred already. I’m not going to say I’m exactly thrilled to see such a wildly successful Kickstarter get greedy and demand more money from its hyper-excited fan-base… but if it really is just a chance to reach stretch goals, then it could always be worse. Some of them do seem rather cool, no lie.

Well, we have 100+ days to see how well it works out for them.