I rather believe journos saying so and being huge fans of Shenmue indeed. I rather believe, that indeed, YsNet didn't sell their PC backers out.
I’m not saying that the decision was made by YSNet nor that it wasn’t made behind their back. From what I can imagine, the decision probably really pissed them off, but they still got money from the deal.
I must be coming down with a case of amnesia, because I don’t remember the articles from all of these super reliable journalists you speak of. I remember all of the ‘YSNet sells out backers’ stories just fine, but the huge story of a publisher scamming a small indie developer out of millions of dollars didn’t seem to make any headlines. Strange...
I never said that the Sony E3 stage didn't contribute to that. But then you proceeded to reply to your own question "spiritual successor". Those were spirital successors and yet, they manage to raise amounts close to that. It's not "Shenmue spiritual successor" but Shenmue 3. Odds were pretty high already to be the most funded.
Shenmue 3 made more than Yooka Laylee and Mighty No 9 combined.
Spiritual successor or not, if you were to give the average gamer today a choice between the spiritual successor to a hugely successful series that had sold tens of millions of copies, the spiritual successor to a game so influential that it literally has a genre named after it, the spiritual successor to what some may argue is the best platform game ever made or the sequel to a game that they most likely never played and is best known for being a huge commercial failure, which do you think they’d choose?
On paper, the S3 Kickstarter had no right to perform as well as it did and would probably be bottom of the above list in the eyes of most of today’s gamers. That it was the best performing of all four of the Kickstarters shows just how important the Sony stage was to Shenmue 3.
I’ve no doubt the game would still have been funded had the news of the Kickstarter been announced quietly on a few gaming websites, but would it have done anywhere near as well as it did?
If only $3m-$5m had been generated through the Kickstarter, do you still think DS would have been so keen to jump on board? Personally, I don’t. They heard ‘record-breaking’ and saw dollar signs if you ask me.
Also, how do you know that Sony didn’t waive or lower the platform royalty fee (usually around $7 per copy) as part of the deal? If that was the case, and looking at the 80:20 split of S1/2 sales in Europe and NA and the 100:00 split of sales of it in Japan, YSNet may have saved themselves more in royalty fees than they would have made through Xbone sales.
You (and some others on here) speak as though Yu and his team are a bunch of bumbling idiots with no business acumen whatsoever and I think you’re doing him and them a huge disservice. The fact is, none of us are privy to any of the details of the deals made surrounding S3. Ultimately though, Yu got to make the game he wanted to make. Maybe once you’ve launched the most successful video game Kickstarter in history and put out a game that tens of thousands of hardcore fans are happy with, you might be in a position to criticize him. Until then, maybe don’t?