Shenmue III Campaign Ends at More than $6m

Over  the weekend, Yu Suzuki's campaign to fund a belated Shenmue sequel through Kickstarter finally drew to a close, having successfully pulled in a total of $6,333,296.

The project hasn't been without a ripple of controversy - not least the lingering question as to why a game introduced and marketed by Sony from E3 onwards needed public funding - but its fan-led momentum has now made it the most successful video game campaign on Kickstarter. 

Shenmue III's $6.3m eclipsed the previous record holder, Blood Stained: Ritual of the Night, which raised $5.5m just a few weeks ago. It's undoubtedly good news for fans of the earlier Shenmue games, and a sign of how much demand there is for a sequel among the sandbox series' cult following. But it's also some distance from the (perhaps over-ambitious) target Suzuki once set. He recently said he needed to raise $10m to make Shenmue III "a much larger, completely open world" video game.

You may recall that the first Shenmue, first released in Japan in 1999, cost a reported $70m - a staggering sum for the time, and still a significant budget for a piece of entertainment even in 2015. Shenmue III will, barring some hefty private investment added at a later date, have less than 10 percent of that budget to play with - though its designers at Ys Net will at least be able to save money by using an off-the-peg engine (Unreal Engine 4) and recycled assets from earlier entries in the series.

At any rate, the success of the Kickstarter campaign means that the once-dormant Shenmue franchise has a new lease of life. We'll just have to wait and see how Yu Suzuki can reintroduce the series to a new generation of consoles and potential fans.