What is your estimated global sales of shenmue 3

I mean, it’s in the high 100s (or it was a few days ago) a week after release at a steep discount. It’s certainly not selling tons. I couldn’t even get enough interest on Resetera to get my thread to two pages.
That's not surprising at all. Most good Shenmue threads don't get attraction over there. You will only see Shenmue get views on that site if they can attack it for some reason or make snarky remarks. I know resetera like to pretend they're this morally, righteous group who are accepting of everything, but everyone outside of that site knows, how hateful and negative they are in general. I'd even say, next time you visit a gaming convention, go and ask developers what they really think about that site and observe their response.

Wasn't me I'm afraid. I struggle to count to 12 let alone pulling together stats haha.
haha legend

To be honest, I dont think Ysnet or Deep Silver really care about the steam release. To be frank, even though i'm a Shenmue fan, I more a less forgot about the steam edition and still haven't picked it up. Everyone who was going to play it on PC, most certainly have already. The small vocal group who keep shouting about how big, bad and evil Epic games are had no intention of playing it in the first place. Pay them no attention and don't waste your time on them. Everyone knows they got bigger issues going on in their life than a PC application.

While it would have been cool to see some promotion for the game, I don't really blame them for just throwing it out there. The game is a year old, everyone has played it, its holiday season, bigger titles are releasing, along with next gen systems. This is also most likely Deep Silver's last bit of involvement with the series, so they probably just wanted to release it and move on.

I don't think you guys should be dishearten or read too much into it. I'd even argue this was always going to happen with the steam edition.

Regardless of that point, Shenmue 3 has continued to steadily sell all year round and it has seen a boost in sales with steam and the limited editions and vinyls. Sure it would have been great if steam released at the same time as epic and ps4, but the Epic deal was made, and I'd even argue may have helped the game secure profits, but that was at the expense of the game's image, so it's definitely a double edged sword.

And I will continue to make this point, why on earth would you seek a bigger budget for two sequels(Shenmue 4 and 5), if your game sold badly? That doesn't make any sense from any perspective. unless your game made cash

Always remember, Shenmue was the game that drove Deep Silver's revenue in the fall of 2019 and it did financially fine.

I know there is always going to be fear about the future of the series, but I don't think you have anything to worry about.

It would be awesome if at some point you could do another breakdown of everything @tomboz
 
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Not sure whether you're being serious or not here. The game hub has been up for years. As soon as a game gets its Steam page it gets a community hub.
Seriously did not know about that; I though it was created recently; but it doesnt make much sense for it exist nor to be a part of it if the game wasn't available on the platform !?

What i've noticed is that since the game went on sale that there as been a lot of activity with players posting reviews, sharing pictures and videos of the game and also creating topics of discussion.

Did anyone noticed before that there were already all of these members in the community hub or did the majority joined in recently !?
 
Seriously did not know about that; I though it was created recently; but it doesnt make much sense for it exist nor to be a part of it if the game wasn't available on the platform !?
I know a Steam page for the game existed before the EGS exclusivity deal was announced, but I don't know the specifics beyond that.

But yeah, fwiw I didn't know how hubs were created either... or even that they existed before you posted that screencap. Is a hub something you have to manually join? Or is it something you join automatically based on certain actions you take (making a review, posting in discussions, etc)?
 
That's not surprising at all. Most good Shenmue threads don't get attraction over there. You will only see Shenmue get views on that site if they can attack it for some reason or make snarky remarks. I know resetera like to pretend they're this morally, righteous group who are accepting of everything, but everyone outside of that site knows, how hateful and negative they are in general. I'd even say, next time you visit a gaming convention, go and ask developers what they really think about that site and observe their response.


haha legend

To be honest, I dont think Ysnet or Deep Silver really care about the steam release. To be frank, even though i'm a Shenmue fan, I more a less forgot about the steam edition and still haven't picked it up. Everyone who was going to play it on PC, most certainly have already. The small vocal group who keep shouting about how big, bad and evil Epic games are had no intention of playing it in the first place. Pay them no attention and don't waste your time on them. Everyone knows they got bigger issues going on in their life than a PC application.

While it would have been cool to see some promotion for the game, I don't really blame them for just throwing it out there. The game is a year old, everyone has played it, its holiday season, bigger titles are releasing, along with next gen systems. This is also most likely Deep Silver's last bit of involvement with the series, so they probably just wanted to release it and move on.

I don't think you guys should be dishearten or read too much into it. I'd even argue this was always going to happen with the steam edition.

Regardless of that point, Shenmue 3 has continued to steadily sell all year round and it has seen a boost in sales with steam and the limited editions and vinyls. Sure it would have been great if steam released at the same time as epic and ps4, but the Epic deal was made, and I'd even argue may have helped the game secure profits, but that was at the expense of the game's image, so it's definitely a double edged sword.

And I will continue to make this point, why on earth would you seek a bigger budget for two sequels(Shenmue 4 and 5), if your game sold badly? That doesn't make any sense from any perspective. unless your game made cash

Always remember, Shenmue was the game that drove Deep Silver's revenue in the fall of 2019 and it did financially fine.

I know there is always going to be fear about the future of the series, but I don't think you have anything to worry about.

It would be awesome if at some point you could do another breakdown of everything @tomboz
Busy with work at the moment so not sure when I’ll get a chance to do a proper dig and, to be honest, I’m not sure it would go much beyond looking at the growth in the game’s player base over the last few months anyway (which has limited value).

One thing I did notice while researching something the other day though is Shenmue 3’s impressive performance relative to Persona 5 Royal.

At the time of writing, P5R has 13,263 tracked users on PSN Profiles and 10,018 on PSN Trophy Leaders. Comparatively, Shenmue 3 has 4,543 and 5,083 respectively. Given the latter’s issues with tracking players who don’t unlock a single trophy though, these figures are probably closer to 5,679 and 6,354.

Persona 5 Royal had shifted 1.4m copies by July of this year, so assuming this number hasn’t increased too drastically and that the ratios of S3 to P5R players are accurate on the trophy sites, they suggest somewhere between 599,457 and 887,962 copies of S3 in circulation on PS4.

To be clear, I don’t think the ratios are right, but comparing S3 to other 1m+ releases typically yields results that are at least over the 250,000 copies mark - with some, like P5R, being considerably higher.

At this point, the only way I can see us finding out how many copies were sold is if the game breaks the 1m mark, somebody leaks the information or Sony accidentally release info that allows people to work out player totals like they did a few years back.
 
Seriously did not know about that; I though it was created recently; but it doesnt make much sense for it exist nor to be a part of it if the game wasn't available on the platform !?

What i've noticed is that since the game went on sale that there as been a lot of activity with players posting reviews, sharing pictures and videos of the game and also creating topics of discussion.

Did anyone noticed before that there were already all of these members in the community hub or did the majority joined in recently !?
Of course, it makes sense. It's a way for publishers/developers/fans/etc to discuss, share news, and generate hype - that's just one of the things that separates Steam from Epic as a platform.

But as for there being a lot of activity, I suggest you take a look at the community hubs for other games released this month. For the actual release announcement as an indicator, 199 people liked the post.

To join players simply have to had clicked follow anytime since the store page was live. I'd suggest, that seeing as the store page has been live for over 2 years, it's probably not a particularly good indicator of the popularity or otherwise, or Shenmue III on Steam. And, of course, many people may/will have followed/unfollowed/forgotten they did either during that time.

What we do know, is that the initial "weekend sale" morphed into a longer sale without an announcement. We also know that the daily peak of concurrent players has practically halved, and there have been 231 reviews, in all languages, in a week.

For comparison, a single-player indie game, Slasher's Keep, came out of Early Access on November 20th - it was $5 cheaper on release and as of posting this comment has 10 times as many concurrent players as Shenmue 3 despite having fewer people follow the game.
 
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They should consider a Shenmue I & II & III discount bundle, if that's possible across 2 publishers. That might move the needle a little bit, but other than that -- if we assume Deep Silver aren't going to spend another cent on promotion -- then the game is destined to do poorly on Steam.

I don't think it was ever going to do great on any PC platform, but a year later? When literally no one is talking about the game? Expectations should be at rock bottom.


They cant do a bundle between two publishers. Because there's nothing to gain for neither parties involved. Plus both games are currently on sales. That's not the issue.

It was a difficult sale to do, but the issue is that DS killed any potential the PC release had. For the record, at full price, Yakuza 7 had more than 25 times the concurrent user numbers of Shenmue 3 (335 vs 9500). Heck even the original release of Shenmue I-II had 1500 ccu at launch. There was something to be done to build a userbase at launch. But a year later on without an overall positive word of mouth, that cant work.
 
I wonder if the Epic deal really hurt any decent Steam sales the title would have had.
Or that it's now a year old game.
Or it's that time of the year with discounts going on with bigger titles.
Or all three.
However you look at it, it's depressing.

Yes and no.
I dont think the game would've been a huge seller because of marketing material/reviews and such.

I also dont think that the game would've sold as much copies as Epic bought.

But while guaranteed money is good, copies sold are as important, if not more if you want a follow up. Guaranteed money is great when you want to make sure you didnt lose any money on a project. But if you lack the userbase, it's a tough sell for the next project because the question that arise is "who are you selling the game to ??"

So while the game would've sold sell than tthe guaranteed copy bought, it would've been sold to actual people. And those people might have spread the word.

The issue is that Shenmue 3 is launching a year later without the positive word around it.
 
The issue is that Shenmue 3 is launching a year later without the positive word around it.
The lack of effort put into marketing Shenmue 3 is, imo, telling of how Deep Silver views the game. Deep Silver took the upfront cash for guaranteed sales from Epic, shared whatever they were contractually obliged to with YS Net, then pretty much did nothing else.

I can understand how continuing with that might have been tempting/seemed sensible when Shenmue 3 was scheduled for release on Steam on the same day as Cyberpunk 2077, but when CD Projekt announced the latest delay it effectively gave Deep Silver an open goal and they didn't do anything to capitalise on it, that's pretty messed up imo.
 
The lack of effort put into marketing Shenmue 3 is, imo, telling of how Deep Silver views the game. Deep Silver took the upfront cash for guaranteed sales from Epic, shared whatever they were contractually obliged to with YS Net, then pretty much did nothing else.

I can understand how continuing with that might have been tempting/seemed sensible when Shenmue 3 was scheduled for release on Steam on the same day as Cyberpunk 2077, but when CD Projekt announced the latest delay it effectively gave Deep Silver an open goal and they didn't do anything to capitalise on it, that's pretty messed up imo.
Shenmue has been doomed marketing/communication wise.

When you look at the clusterfuck that was Shenmue 2, communication wise... The game was canceled in NA for Dreamcast, just to get release on Xbox, so players who awaited Shenmue 2 and bought a PlayStation to replace the old dead Dreamcast were f***** in the a** unless they bought an imported European Dreamcast version. And then the game released on Xbox with a disaster of communication.

I know it's the same with Shenmue 3. The communication during the Kickstarter campaign was lacking, the overall communication was bad if not inexistent at times. So it surely didn't help at all.

And yeah, the fact that the game received strong criticism on the internet didn't help. And I do believe that the Epic exclusive really didn't help the game's image. At this point, even people who weren't interested in the game in the first place started trashing it.
 
To be honest, outside of the Metro series i don't see Deep Silver pushing any of their games. I think we only saw as much Shenmue stuff as we did because we were actively looking for it.
Oh yeah, only the fans heard it all about Shenmue 3.

I read a few comments on the internet post-release that were like "wow, it's not even the end ? What an insult to the backers who pledged to finally see the end" while we knew or "wow, I didn't know the game was out. I heard it was kickstarted and then never heard about it anymore".

You know, outside our bubble of fans, I think the everyday joe wasn't aware of Shenmue 3 for alot of things.
 
Well Deep Silvers Indie RPG Outward only received 60-75% reviews worldwide
yet they still sold over 400,000 copies in 7 months and the studio was able to create
two full new story expansion packs. Did you see any big advertisement for that game?
The trailer were even self made by the studio with the head of the studio just talking over it.
It still worked because the genre fantasy RPG with crafting, survival etc is super popular.

Maybe we have to acknowledge that part three of a japanese adventure revenge story,
now taking place in China, is not as popular as other genres.
And no publisher is going to invest way more money in advertisement when he sees
that other IPs work with even less investment.

And its not like there were endless options. What would have happened without Deep Silver?
Sega wasnt going to publish it in retail, Sony wasnt going to publish it in retail.
Would there even be a retail release without Deep Silver? Digital only?
Probably self published by YsNet and Shibuya Prod and how are they going to pay
for advertisement and that stuff, how are they going to do preview events, invitations and all that stuff?
Just a reminder that all of these preview sessions, Ys Net Studio interviews, Gamescom stuff and so on
were handled by Koch Media (Deep Silver) and they gave Ys Net 10 Mil USD or whatever to work with in the development.

Whats the alternative without Deep Silver? Wheres the advertisement, development, event budget coming from?
 
Well Deep Silvers Indie RPG Outward only received 60-75% reviews worldwide
yet they still sold over 400,000 copies in 7 months and the studio was able to create
two full new story expansion packs. Did you see any big advertisement for that game?
The trailer were even self made by the studio with the head of the studio just talking over it.
It still worked because the genre fantasy RPG with crafting, survival etc is super popular.

Maybe we have to acknowledge that part three of a japanese adventure revenge story,
now taking place in China, is not as popular as other genres.
And no publisher is going to invest way more money in advertisement when he sees
that other IPs work with even less investment.

And its not like there were endless options. What would have happened without Deep Silver?
Sega wasnt going to publish it in retail, Sony wasnt going to publish it in retail.
Would there even be a retail release without Deep Silver? Digital only?
Probably self published by YsNet and Shibuya Prod and how are they going to pay
for advertisement and that stuff, how are they going to do preview events, invitations and all that stuff?
Just a reminder that all of these preview sessions, Ys Net Studio interviews, Gamescom stuff and so on
were handled by Koch Media (Deep Silver) and they gave Ys Net 10 Mil USD or whatever to work with in the development.

Whats the alternative without Deep Silver? Wheres the advertisement, development, event budget coming from?


It's not because that there may not have been an alternative to Deep Silver that it means their handling of the game was okay.

Was it not for them, it would've been a worse situation yes.

But does it mean they had to give up the game close to release ? I dont think so.

I also dont think Shenmue's issue is about being of a difficult to sell genre. It's also a game fairly focused on narrative and action. But it's a game that always had shitty marketing. Funnily I never seen 3 being sold as an epic story (well... That would've been a blatant lie) nor focus on the aspects that appeal to people.
 
I'm not disagreeing with the critical voices, of course it could have been handled better.
But the thing is, we all can list dozens of things that could have been handled better,
its very easy for us to criticize things.
But the really important question is not what or how to do things better, thats not the problem,
the important question is Who is going to do it better?
If there would be so many awesome alternatives, then why did we end up with Deep Silver?
If its so easy to get a different big name, then why are there no news about how Sega, MS, Sony or whatever
are paying the developing costs for Shenmue 4 right now? Why didnt they pay 100% for Shenmue 3?

I totally get that there are a lot of small and big things where we wanted to see something else
but the problem is, that the discussion about it is not really helpful when no one is offering these services.
If i was able to choose, then of course i would choose different options and ways
than the ones we got. But this is just wishful thinking, no one is offering that.
Yes, Deep Silver could have handled a lot of things differently but they didnt.
Thats just how it is. But as far as i know this was still pretty much our best option.
The only other realistic option would be the self published cheaper 7 Mil KS only game
and i doubt that we would have seen better advertisement, event appearances, retail versions etc with that option
because i doubt that Ys Net and Shibuya Prod are able to pay any of that with their own pockets.

Again, its easy to list all of the mistakes and how we want things to change.
But who is gonna do it? We all know that there are other / better publishers
but if they are not interested in offering their services then we have to live with the "best worst" option.
Or we make it 100% clear that we dont want someone like DS anymore,
risking that we wont get any help at all.
 
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