Himuro wrote: I posted this on the Kickstarter comment section. Agree/Disagree?Thank you Yu, and everyone else involved doing this. However, there's a lot of confusion with this Kickstarter. I think you guys are unknowingly damaging the potential for the Kickstarter. Besides revealing Sony's involvement on the first day of the Kickstarter, giving people the idea that there is no more need to back it on Kickstarter because a big company like Sony is supporting it, there's also a lot of vagueness in relation to the stretch goals.
For example, what exactly is Raport? What is the Skill Tree? What are Character Perspectives? No one knows or understands, and this vagueness leaves doubts not only on your potential backers but current backers. Could you further expound upon these features?
Finally, why isn't Yu doing interviews all over the place for the Kickstarter to give information? There was a French interview on Youtube, but not one available in English. A lot of the marketing so far is scattershot and unorganized. Please do better. Thank you, a grateful Shenmue fan.
Just be a total slut for 30 days. Try and get interviewed by everyone and get news sites posting about Shenmue. Yu needs to get in the public light similar to how other Kickstarter project leaders have. Get more developers to make videos about why they love Shenmue, plenty of people have said they love it over the years in interviews. Get someone in the team to interview Yu and put it on the Kickstarter page and drop them every few days. Interviews should have been arranged weeks ago for every major gaming news outlet. I can imagine Yu will just go back to Japan after E3 and we won't hear from him again for months.
Make it clear what these S I&II scenes are. If it's like Shenmue the movie let people know so it doesn't put people off who have never played the series and that they can catch up. Nowhere on the Kickstarter page does it sound welcoming at all to newcomers to the series.
Do a let's play of certain sections of the original Shenmue. In these Yu could just speak about making the game and the history at SEGA. Let's plays aren't my cup of tea but people go crazy for them. Add a tier where you get a monthy skype session or online Q&A's with members of the team working on the games.
Get an english twitter account similar to what Kojima has. The Japansese audience is very small compared to America and America has the biggest funding potential. Only starting to use Twitter again about a day before E3 was silly. This isn't like the FFVII announcement where it's a nice surprise. For a Kickstarter that only lasts 30 days you should be teasing it for quite awhile.
Don't announce you'll do shows like the one in Monoco. Announce stretch goals that you will go to places like PAX, Tokyo Game Show, Playstation Experiance and Gamecom. No one outside of the core people who already have donated will care about seeing a game at an anime convention in Monoco. A tier could be made that if you donate enough you get access to a special Q&A with Yu or early hands on time with the game at Pax would bring in some extra money. If people are willing to pay £10,000 and also pay to fly to Tokyo to have dinner with the guy they'll do it if they don't have to pay to fly and his coming to PAX so extra dinners is something.
Include tiers like letting people voice a character or to let them name something in a tier between the $500-$10,000. You're letting people include their name in the credits why not let some people add a message next to their name for a few extra dollars to get a few people to up their pledge. Heck for even more money get your photo in the credits. Include a tier where people can have themselves made into a toy capsule Ryo can collect.
The toy capsules replicas are great but have a donation pledge to get replicas of the mirrors. Make them a decent quality so you can ask for more to get them.
The Double Fine team did a documentary about making the game that certain backers got access to. The Shenmue III story will be one people want to watch.