Yokosuka Martian wrote: Henry Spencer wrote: Yokosuka Martian wrote: While I do think the whole thing could have been handled better, I agree that we shouldn't be attacking anyone personally. There are better ways to go about this. We as fans of Shenmue should simply help them make it better. They are clearly open to suggestions and criticism.
Hmmm, are they? Their social media presence is next to null. There's really no interaction with the fanbase that I can see aside from these one off interviews with Yu Suzuki and I am guessing those happen because of Yu Suzuki himself more than anything else.
I mean, it is taking them
forever to even "consider" a PayPal option for people who don't like Kickstarter. I mean, come on, time is getting on now. It's really about time they already sorted basic things like that out.
I do agree the PayPal thing should be an option because many have complained that it is their only way of funding. What would you recommend they do to increase their social media presence, though? I feel like all we can do now is simply deal with the hand that we've been dealt with. Suzuki won't change companies halfway through the campaign so we'll just have to collaborate with AJ.
They have a Twitter account but you really wouldn't know it. They never reply to any questions and have hardly tweeted anything at all, but Awesome Japan are supposed to be the PR and marketing team, so at least some social media presence should be required to promote the Kickstarter. They're basically just relying on us to do all of the work for them. And that's cool, we're the fans, but there's only so much we can do and they're the ones getting
paid to do it.
And people have been posting their ideas on here a lot already. Add a Facebook account that frequently updates, get some sort of mail list going, add more goals which should be clearer from the start, get on top of the games media bashing the Kickstarter rather than just ignoring it, add frequent updates to the Kickstarter (sort of like how the guys doing the Bloodstained Kickstarter did, or the Mighty No. 9 Kickstarter), get friends of Yu Suzuki's who are influential in game development to post videos on why people should help their friend Yu Suzuki with donating to the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter, have a blog, do some sort of viral marketing thing, advertise the Kickstarter even just a little bit; it was just E3 and that was it, anybody who isn't into gaming anymore wouldn't know about Shenmue 3 (like I've said before, there's still loads of former Dojo members who haven't logged in who we thought would...) add an official YouTube page and upload videos, add incentives for people outside Europe and NA to donate. There's really loads of ways to advertise things nowadays. It's really not my job to come up with ideas for a marketing/PR firm anyway, they should be the ones to do this sort of thing.[/tired]