Sony revealed Shenmue III and its Kickstarter campaign during its E3 2015 conference. In less than nine hours, the campaign reached its US$2 million goal.
However, Sony will also officially fund the game's marketing and help develop the Shenmue III announced at E3, confirmed Gio Corsi, the company's director of Third Party Productions.
“People have been asking for this since I joined the PlayStation team,” Corsi said during a Sony livestream at E3 2015. “We met with Suzuki-san at the last GDC and started thinking about how to make this project work. We concluded that the only way the game could succeed would be with fan support, and Kickstarter seemed like a great place to earn that support.”
“So we set a goal and agreed that if the project managed to reach it, we would support it,” Corsi said. “Sony and PlayStation are definitely partners on this game."
Since it is a SEGA franchise, the arrangement will probably be the same one made between Nintendo and Bayonetta 2, also a SEGA property, giving the company permission to fund and publish the product.
"We can expand this story," creator Yu Suzuki said. " Shenmue III will be the story you have been waiting for. The fate of Shenmue is in your hands now."
The Kickstarter project includes rewards for the first people to donate US$10,000, including a jacket like the one Masaya Matsukaze wore at events 14 years earlier. Another reward was a dinner with Yu Suzuki in Japan. With stretch goals set as high as US$4 million, the team explains that more details will be revealed as those additional goals are reached.
The Shenmue III team expects the Kickstarter campaign rewards to be shipped around December 2017, so it is reasonable to imagine the game arriving around that time or later.
The new Shenmue is expected to be released for PlayStation 4 and PC, and will use Unreal Engine 4.
