I will chime and say it's a really hard slog to get non-fans onto the bandwagon.
I was only able to convince two of my many gaming friends to jump on board. Both of the got the $29 tier. One of the after much badgering, the other spontaneously did it because she was impressed with the Volunteer Teacher's retweet in Guilin in China, herself being Chinese might of had something to do with too.
There is just so much that Shenmue can offer many gamers, such as a great engaging story, MMA style fighting, open world-ish, mini games. Much of what makes The Witcher 3 a great game was found in Shenmue. But Shenmue just doesn't have that same raw danger about it that makes games appealing in today's DOOM/COD/BF/DudeBro dominated machismo gaming landscape.
A few people I know, who used to be fans didn't even help kickstart. They're just happy to let the true hard core fans shell out the cash to fund development and buy a retail copy later.
I really hope we don't have to Kickstart Shenmue IV or V because despite being an amazing month, it was exhausting and stressful. Even hitting $6.3 million dollars, I'm not even sure what kinda of game we're getting.
Part of me likes to think yeah, those rumours were right, Sony only wanted a low $2m to know that there is an appetite for it. That same part of me wants to think Sony and Shibuya will foot the rest of the development bill no matter what and for them to talk about marketing and porting to PS4 was only a ruse.
But the other part of me hears what Suzuki says and that only the $6.3m from the kickstarter will be used for development of the game and associated costs like Kickstarter levy, merchandise creation and shipping etc, and as a result, we'll miss out on many things which made Shenmue 1 & 2 great because it had a healthy budget.
Perhaps it's a mix of both, probably that will be the best scenario.
With Bloodstained, correct me if I'm wrong, Igarashi asked for $500,000 as a proof of concept of fan's desire for a Castlevania type game. They said it was 10% of what they needed, therefore the real cost is $500,000 x 10 = $5,000,000. They got $5,500,000 or there abouts. So they got enough to make a side scroller.
With Shenmue if we apply the same logic that the original goal was $2,000,000 and that represents 10% again, therefore the real cost would be $2,000,000 x 10 = $20,000,000. We raised $6,300,000 so, $13,700,000 short of what it probably should take to make Shenmue III.
Now by Adam Korilik's videos, we heard that at that time Shenmue I's real cost was approximately $20m as well. So perhaps that reinforces the real cost to make Shenmue III.
So will Sony and Shibuya foot the rest of the $13.7 million, will they be able to make that money back and then get profit as well? Tough question..
Maybe, that's why Suzuki said, if we obtain $10 million in the kickstarter, he can realise his true open world vision for Shenmue III because Sony & Shibuya would either double the kickstarter fund 2x$10m = $20 million. So if going by that premise if Sony & Shibuya double the Kickstarter, we get $12.6 million, which is still $7.4 million short of the full $20 million budget. Or Sony & Shibuya are putting in a flat $10 million, so we get to $16.3 million which leaves $3.7 million short.
Not enough information to really know.