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Shenmue III's Record-Setting Kickstarter Ends at US$6.33 Million
posted on by Jennifer Sherman
Yū Suzuki's Shenmue III video game Kickstarter campaign closed on Friday after raising US$6,333,295 from 69,320 backers. The game set a new record for the highest funded video game Kickstarter campaign.
The Shenmue III campaign surpassed the previous record set by Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi's Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night campaign that ended last month with US$5,545,991 in pledges. Both campaigns had 32-day funding periods.
In June, The Guinness World Records site reported that Shenmue III was the fastest video game crowdfunding campaign to raise US$1 million in pledges. The campaign took 1 hour and 42 minutes to reach the US$1 million landmark, beating the previous record of 6 hours and 5 minutes set by Torment: Tides of Numenera.
The campaign also became the second fastest Kickstarter campaign to reach US$1 million, behind the campaign for the Pebble Watch smartwatch in February, which took 46 minutes to reach that milestone.
Suzuki announced the Shenmue III Kickstarter at the PlayStation E3 press conference in June with an initial goal of US$2 million. The campaign met that goal within nine hours of launching before adding stretch goals for the previous games' cinema shorts, subtitles in five languages (German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese), rapport and skill tree systems, an expanded Baisha village setting, and five mini games.
Suzuki is aiming to release the game for PlayStation 4 and PC in December 2017. Sega released the original Shenmue on its own Dreamcast platform in 1999, and released the Shenmue II sequel on the Dreamcast in 2001, and on the Microsoft Xbox in 2002. The series was originally planned as a trilogy.
[Via Gematsu]
