Re: Shenmue 3 Kickstarter announced at E3 2015!
Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 12:32 pmDeta wrote: You cant emphasize the need of excellent promotion enough on this project. Promotion is in key role to make this project succeed. How will they promote and manage to capture new players to play the game without playing the first two. Even if there will be a short movie. Will that be enough and how else they would sell the game for the newcomers. The promotion team is getting huge opportunity to show what they are capable to do. This was one of the biggest reasons along the ps2 why Shenmue started to stumble so early on the road.
We have a long way to go yet but the initial announcement created a huge noise, the Shenmue community have turned this up to 11 and generated a huge buzz online promoting interest in Shenmue way beyond just the gaming press. Honestly the hype generated by the online community is priceless, can't be manufactured, can't be bought and can't be replicated, it's been unbelieveable.
While there will be a comms strategy for Shenmue III the game, imo the project needs something akin to a campaign, an overall comms strategy to tell every gamer that they simply must play this game, which i see no evidence of. For instance the design of the kickstarter is poor, the reward tiers and benefits have gaping holes. Somebody overseeing all of the project from an overall comms perspective would have seen that straight away, nailing the kickstarter is just as important as nailing E3, momentum is everything with Shenmue III . The silence of Sega has also been deafening, not a statement, not a tweet, retweet, like, simply silence. The HD remakes will have a huge impact on the success of Shenmue III and the fact they are letting Yu have the IP should have been part of the E3 presentation. Sega's absence is strange and unhelpful. Sony have been off message in the last two days and have no got a consistent line regarding their involvement, i've heard 6 different lines from Sony spokesperson's which is unforgiveable. It all points to a bit of a mess on the comms front. In contrast the community have been incredible and masked some of these early mistakes.
Btw the original game was promoted very well. The was a palpable sense of anticipation among the gaming press worldwide in the months before it's release. It sold over 1 million copies on a user base of under 10 million, but that wasn't the point. Shenmue needed to be a launch title for the Dreamcast that's the reason it got made, it wasn't and the rest is history.
!!!! He going be answering a lot of questions! This is awesome! We really need to push the extra Tier rewards and try to get some clear info on the stretch goals!