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The production costs for the first Shenmue game were in the neighborhood of 50 million dollars, which made it the most expensive video game at the time. A worth
by psykotic 15y ago
The production costs for the first Shenmue game were in the neighborhood of 50 million dollars, which made it the most expensive video game at the time. A worthy sequel would take a lot of money to get made. I'd rather the series stay buried than be botched. Let's all be thankful that cheap Shenmue MMO cash-in never saw the light of day.
- ekianjo 15y agoWell, the cost of the original ShenMue was huge because there were a number of R&D efforts going into it. There were no middleware engines at that time, everything had to be created from scratch (remember that development started on the Saturn, not the Dreamcast) so I would not take the first figure as a reliable benchmark for a production of this magnitude in 2010s. There are many complex games being made those days with much lower budgets (rather in the 10-20 millions range), a testament to productivity increase over time. 3D asset creation has gone a long way since 1997-1998. I doubt a Kickstarter effort would be a silver bullet to get the game funded in its entirety, but it could well be a good place to start from and then have other partners (publishers or other investors) jump in to help fund the rest later on while work goes on. I believe the goal of such a crowdsourcing effort for ShenMue 3 would also be to assess the market size for such a sequel. Honestly, no big publisher is going to bet on ShenMue and pour money in it. They are too risk-adverse. If it were the happen, the community, the fans would have to lead the way.