Lan Di-sama wrote: As much as Shenmue needs Yu Suzuki, Yu Suzuki needs Sega to make Shenmue. This "rights" thing is a bit misguided, imo. While I fully support the Yu Suzuki twitter campaign, I'm not sure if it's addressing the correct issue.
If Sega just "gave Yu the licence" he'd have no money, no development team, and no company to publish the game. It's a fucked up relationship but regardless, Sega needs to publish Shenmue 3 if it were ever to happen. They're not just gonna give away publishing rights to another company and there's no other company who'd want it anyway.
There are two ways of looking at it.
One is that, sure, having full control of the license wouldn't guarantee that Yu can get the game made. But it frees him up to shop around and explore whatever options may be out there, even if they are few and far between. My belief is that Yu cares more about making the game than Sega does, and for that reason I would like it to be his decision whether any particular avenue of opportunity is explored or not. I hate to think that Sega is dismissing certain ideas because it doesn't fit their self image or because it means working with a specific competitor, etc. If the buck stops with Yu, I believe he would do whatever's in the best interests of the game being made, and if he couldn't get it done, I'd at least be satisfied that every attempt had been made.
The other way of looking at it is to not take the #GiveYuTheShenmueLicense hashtag quite so literally. Many people use it as simply a means of expressing their frustration with Sega's inaction, and essentially asking them to #GiveYuTheChanceToMakeShenmue3 - but that's excessively long for a hashtag. It's still calling for Shenmue 3 to be made, while acknowledging that it's not Yu's reluctance standing in the way.
Whichever way you look at it, the Tweetathon is capturing people's imaginations and lighting a fire under the casual fanbase for an organized, constructive goal. The sentiment speaks louder than the semantics.