BruceWayne911
Arm Break Fire (➡️⬅️⬅️ 👐)
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2018
- Location
- Everywhere like bird $hit
- Favourite title
- Shenmue II
- Currently playing
- Yakuza Kiwami 2
Shenmue was a victim of circumstance. The Dreamcast's death and the effect it had on Shenmue II and therefore Shenmue III, development hell with Shenmue Online, SEGA - Sammy very likely killing Shenmue III and more on the original Xbox, even up until now with the mediocre handling of Shenmue III by Deep Silver, and now with the fight to get a season 2 of Shenmue The Animation, having to wade through the sale of Crunchyroll as well as the merger of Discovery and Warner Media, who owns Cartoon Network and Adult Swim/Toonami.
In my eyes, it is stupid to look at Shenmue through the lens of 2001 from a business perspective, but what do I know? Maybe SEGA is weighing getting involved, maybe they were waiting to see how Shenmue III did before potentially backing Shenmue IV. We will likely never know.
I agree that the SEGA we have today is not the SEGA we had during the hardware days. Though I will take the SEGA that has given us the portfolio it has put out this gen, compared to the early 360/PS3/Wii days, where we had gems like Golden Axe: Beast RIder, Iron Man, and Daisy Fuentes Pilates. We've gotten Shenmue I & II, Shenmue The Animation, and Shenmue III, Rez Infinite, Streets Of Rage 4, Panzer Dragoon: Remake, and The House Of The Dead: Remake, and Space Channel 5 VR: Kinda Funky News Flash. Now, outside of the rereleases and the anime, the rest have only had a supervisory role/creative input from SEGA, but they are still SEGA games. We also had Valkyria Chronicles 4, multiple Yakuza/Sonic games, including Sonic Mania, Super Monkey Ball games, a new Sakura Wars, new mini hardware (Astro City, Mega Drive/Genesis, and Game Gear), compilations like Mega Drive/Genesis Classics, SEGA AGES games, The House Of The Dead: Scarlet Dawn, Puyo Puyo entries, Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis, Virtua Fighter 5: Ultimate Showdown, ChuChu Rocket! Universe, and of course entries in the Total War, Football Manager, and Hatsune Miku franchises, which all do fairly well sales wise, obviously.
All fo that is a HUGE step forward compared to before the PS4/Xbox One/Switch generation. I'd argue that SEGA have been putting out their best content since the Dreamcast/immediate post Dreamcast days (ports and releases of cancelled Dreamcast games to Xbox/GameCube/PS2 like Shenmue II, Panzer Dragoon Orta, etc.).
I dont see Sega getting involved or even trying. Sega makes no comments or shows any involvement. The longer time goes on it most likely looks like we are alone in this battle. The budget of Shenmue 3 seems like it was 20M that figure is more than likely out of reach for Sega. Everything suggest that Shenmue is trending upward: Shenmue 3 did okay, Shenmue 1&2 sold good, Shenmue did better than expected and still no praise or confirmation from Sega. Its very telling from Big Blue.