110 Industries & Yu Suzuki

24Nathan said:
Here are some figures we have, which paint a rather incomplete picture:

Shenmue I was listed as having sold 1.2 million units worldwide, and here is a chart that breaks down North American/Japanese sales: https://web.archive.org/web/20050228083737/http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~hokora/english/dcchart.html

That puts PAL sales at around another ~400k, so all regions had a comparable amount of sales.

This chart says U. S. Shenmue only sold a little less than 3k about a month after its release:

The same chart for Shenmue I above lists Shenmue II on Dreamcast at about 126k. Quite a remarkable drop from Shenmue I's numbers. The only numbers I have for Shenmue II show that the North American Xbox release sold about 26k in its first week or so of sales: http://web.archive.org/web/20030628171856/http://g-rev.com/Special/Shenmue/News/News2002.html

It also charted number one for PAL Xbox sales: http://web.archive.org/web/20030628172208/http://g-rev.com/Special/Shenmue/News/News2003.html

Then, this Xbox magazine estimates IIx sold about 320k total, which isn't too shabby, and shows that it outpaced the Dreamcast release, at least in Japan:

View attachment 16816


I also have an old interview with Charles Bellfield from IGN, where he flat out says that retailers were basically saying that Dreamcast numbers were proving to SEGA that Shenmue II would not be successful in North America unless it went elsewhere, so therefore we got IIx. He also says the plan was to have more games in the series to recoup costs sunk into Shenmue II, but we all know how that turned out. I can share the .pdf if anyone is interested in reading the whole thing.

I need to go back and save what little sales data we have for III...I believe there was a week one Japanese charting, and then maybe a charting in Spain or Portugal, if I remember correctly? Plus the THQ Nordic "it did fine" comment.

For I & II, Adam Koralik said SEGA were pleasantly surprised. Aside from that, all I have is this:
View attachment 16817
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Shenmue 1 and 2 charted at #2 here in the UK as well.
 
I have no doubt Shenmue 4 could easily push 100 - 200k units very quickly upon release. And then go on to push another 400k. There is no Kickstarter for early copies and the IP has gained a new audience with the anime. Plus it has its legendary known status in gaming

The issue with Shenmue has always been its release timing and marketing strategy

Shenmue 1 and Shenmue the anime were marketed and released properly without any issues. They both did amazing numbers.

Shenmue 2 on the Dreamcast got a stealth release with no marketing and was on a dying console. It was also omitted from the American audience, which is one of gaming's biggest markets.

Shenmue 2x got a stealth release with no marketing. A lot of hardcore fans didn't even know the game came out. So I can only imagine what casual fans must have thought. That said, I personally think the numbers it drew were still pretty good with all things considered

Shenmue HD had an ok launch but was plagued by infinite amounts of bugs. D3T did an absolutely terrible job and should be ashamed to release a product in that state. It was so bad, that Sega of japan stated they would fight them to fix the game. And Sega Japan, as we all know are not very fond of Shenmue

Shenmue 3 was sent to die. Releasing it in the fall against all of the mainstream gaming titans was stupid and we all predicted its downfall before its release. It's obvious deepshitva wanted to meet its quarterly targets at the expense of the IP. Personally, I hope they never go anywhere near Shenmue again. That, along with the handling and communication from the Kickstarter, led the project to be a complete shitshow.

When you look back, you can hardly see any issues with the marketing and release timing for Shenmue 1 and Shenmue The Animation. Both went on to do great things. Shenmue 4 needs to follow the same path and avoid the mistakes of Shenmue 2 and Shenmue 3.
 
Tosh said:
Alright, yet you still didnt answer why Sega or any other japanese company never tried to go for the Japan only path,
like many other niche game series over there do.
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Because it has no relevance whatsoever to the topic being discussed. Shenmue was never intended to be a niche series, so why on earth would Sega (or anybody else, for that matter) intentionally alienate 98.6% of the world’s population by only releasing it in Japan?

Tosh said:
If the japanese audience is so much bigger and the IP so much more popular over there, why did it even need all of these steps with the huge pause between S2 and 3.

Why did Yu Suzuki even had to ask for international support if Japan carries the IP single handedly?
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Again, nowhere have I said that Japan single-handedly carries the IP. The data we have suggests that between 25% and 33% of all Shenmue sales have been in Japan. That might make it the most popular single region, but 67% to 75% of sales still take place elsewhere.

Tosh said:
Sega clearly had no problem with giving away the IP to someone else as long as Sega keeps all of the IP rights,
yet the best offer didnt come from any of the dozens of japanese publishers,
you know, the country where the devs are from,
no the best offer came from a AA publisher from Austria Germany.
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Sega didn’t give away the IP. They licensed it out to Yu, who then signed a publishing deal with Deep Silver a few years later. As for why it was Deep Silver who made the best offer, we can only speculate, but I expect that it’s a combination of two things.

First and foremost, it appears that, like you, Deep Silver made the mistake of massively over-estimating the popularity of Shenmue outside of Japan. Granted, it didn’t sell amazingly well here either, but had it performed similarly elsewhere (ie, been the best-selling PS4 game in its opening week) it would have sold over a million copies worldwide, which, based on Embracer’s comments and its failure to chart in any major territory outside of Japan, it seems safe to say that it didn’t.

Tosh said:
You can literally scroll through the original Kickstarter comments
and there are 3 japanese comments within a pool of 1000 comments.
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Here are some links to reuploads of some of the reactions to Shenmue 3’s announcement on NicoNico (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Between them they have more than 7,000 comments, all of which are in Japanese. Does that mean that no Western Shenmue fans didn’t comment on or care about Shenmue 3’s announcement? Of course not.

I really shouldn’t have to explain why Japanese people might prefer to use a Japanese site to talk about Shenmue than a western one (or vice versa), nor that comments on a Kickstarter page or NicoNico video have nothing to do with sales. Also, you do realize that some Japanese people can speak English, right?

Tosh said:
Also i didnt say that the Shenmue content didnt came from Japan
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You absolutely did. Check your original post.

Tosh said:
All of the updated Shenmue merchandise came from western companies.
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No. It. Didn’t.

Tosh said:
Your own argument about Japan vs EU & US does make as much sense as mine.
Ok, then lets compare the single countries like Austria with 9 mil people or Denmark with 6 mil
against Japan with 126 mil. Not a single country in EU comes close to the population in Japan.
So i guess true japanese games can never be a success or popular in these single countries then
because its impossible to reach that same ratio.
Yeah, thats way more fair than EU / US vs Japan.
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You’ve lost me a little here. My argument is (and has always been) that between 25% and 33% of all Shenmue sales have been in Japan and that the proportion of the population purchasing the games in Japan is higher than it is in Europe or North America. There is plenty of data floating around to back this up, some of which was posted a little earlier on in this thread.

For example, estimates suggest that the Shenmue HD remasters sold around 10,000 copies in their first week in the UK (around one sale for every 6,722 people), compared to 37,500 week 1 sales in Japan (around one sale for every 3,355 people). Estimates suggest that Shenmue 3 sold around 5,000 units in its first week on sale in the UK (around one sale for every 13,444 people), while we know that it sold 17,857 physical copies during its opening week in Japan (around one sale for every 7,045 people). In both cases, we can see that Shenmue is almost twice as popular in Japan when viewed as a proportion of the total population.

Tosh said:
I guess Shenmue really is something magical. A IP / series that is literally being almost completely funded internationally
for 5, 6, 7 years now, yet the big main audience is all japanese. Sounds plausible.
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For the umptienth time, nowhere have I said that the main audience for Shenmue is in Japan. Shenmue is more popular here than it is in the rest of the world, but due to Japan only making up 1.6% of the world’s population, between 67% and 75% of the total market for Shenmue is elsewhere.
 
ShenSun said:
Shenmue 2x got a stealth release with no marketing. A lot of hardcore fans didn't even know the game came out. So I can only imagine what casual fans must have thought. That said, I personally think the numbers it drew were still pretty good with all things considered
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I was devastated when it was speculated that Shenmue 2 wouldn’t be made. I hadn’t even heard when it was released on the DC. And then I was in a Walmart here in the states getting stuff for my freshman year of college and saw a video clip in the video game section. I was floored.

I bought an Xbox within the next couple of days. It was one day in October because it was just a matter of a couple of weeks before the game was released. It was truly a magical time for me. Surreal experience.
 
shadowreaper said:
I was devastated when it was speculated that Shenmue 2 wouldn’t be made. I hadn’t even heard when it was released on the DC. And then I was in a Walmart here in the states getting stuff for my freshman year of college and saw a video clip in the video game section. I was floored.

I bought an Xbox within the next couple of days. It was one day in October because it was just a matter of a couple of weeks before the game was released. It was truly a magical time for me. Surreal experience.
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I was lucky enough to get the EU Dreamcast version of Shenmue 2. I do remember randomly walking into a game shop and seeing Shenmue 2x in the corner. I thought "damn when did that come out?"...........it came out 6 months earlier lol.
 
ShenSun said:
I was lucky enough to get the EU Dreamcast version of Shenmue 2. I do remember randomly walking into a game shop and seeing Shenmue 2x in the corner. I thought "damn when did that come out?"...........it came out 6 months earlier lol.
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we on the original, old dojo had no idea when the dreamcast version of shenmue 2 (EU) was coming out till the day of release. it was just another one of those weird shenmue things or maybe sega wasn't that great at advertising in the west(?)
 
personally, i knew of 2x OCT 2002 release date prior along with most US dojo members iirc

also, anyone theorized the apple was Air Twister for Apple OS devices?

therefor.... banana must be...?
 
TGS is in a month from now so if there is something planned for TGS
i doubt there is going to happen anything in the time frame before TGS.
And i'm only looking at TGS because of 110 Industries
and i think if they really have something, it will pop up at TGS, not at Gamescom.
 
darksniper said:
I'm really glad that most of the people here at the Dojo have not given up on Shenmue IV after the disastrous release of III. Even though there's some great games coming down the pipeline, I still want Shenmue IV more than anything else. Keep up the good fight fellas!
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I’m not entirely sure the release of Shenmue 3 was ‘disastrous’ but I’d certainly acknowledge there were issues. I’d prefer to think it was a steep learning curve for, essentially, a brand new development team. No question, mistakes were made, the press caused issues putting out badly researched articles (which were not addressed quickly enough by Awesome Japan/YS Net) and, maybe, we all imagined more of a AAA product than was feasible on a AA budget. I’ve recently seen comparisons to Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (apparently made for a similar budget) but Ninja Theory were a long established team making a (fantastic but) linear title whereas it’s a completely different challenge to create a fully interactive open world with hundreds of unique characters. IF, we get a Shenmue 4, I would hope there have been a number of learnings from development from the previous game. And I will fully understand when Yu Suzuki inevitably streamlines the structure for any further instalments.
 
i think the best thing to do is to hold on to hope of shenmue 4 but expect nothing, its so easy to look at something and take it the any way we want to. we see a company talking to Yu san and automatically assume it S4 and drive ourselves crazy speculating.
I personally believe that if there would be a continuation to Shenmue they would have to remake at least the first 2 to get new fans on board. We managed to a Shenmue 3 and I think its possible we could get a 4, until then I'll hang on to hope and check in here everyday like i have done for years :D
 
Nick Hughes said:
I’m not entirely sure the release of Shenmue 3 was ‘disastrous’ but I’d certainly acknowledge there were issues. I’d prefer to think it was a steep learning curve for, essentially, a brand new development team. No question, mistakes were made, the press caused issues putting out badly researched articles (which were not addressed quickly enough by Awesome Japan/YS Net) and, maybe, we all imagined more of a AAA product than was feasible on a AA budget. I’ve recently seen comparisons to Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (apparently made for a similar budget) but Ninja Theory were a long established team making a (fantastic but) linear title whereas it’s a completely different challenge to create a fully interactive open world with hundreds of unique characters. IF, we get a Shenmue 4, I would hope there have been a number of learnings from development from the previous game. And I will fully understand when Yu Suzuki inevitably streamlines the structure for any further instalments.
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For what it's worth I think that Shenmue III achieved exactly what it was trying to do, which was to get Ryo out of the cave. My issue was that I expected more story progression. When I go back and play it today, it wasn't a bad game by no means, but definitely not the AAA game as you mentioned earlier. I agree with you if we do get Shenmue IV, the experience from building the 3rd game should carry over well into that new project.
 
Gevaudian said:
i think the best thing to do is to hold on to hope of shenmue 4 but expect nothing, its so easy to look at something and take it the any way we want to. we see a company talking to Yu san and automatically assume it S4 and drive ourselves crazy speculating.
I personally believe that if there would be a continuation to Shenmue they would have to remake at least the first 2 to get new fans on board. We managed to a Shenmue 3 and I think its possible we could get a 4, until then I'll hang on to hope and check in here everyday like i have done for years :D
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I definitely agree that we probably shouldn’t expect too much right now, but I honestly don’t think Yu would delay making S4 to release a remake of the first two. The re-release of Shenmue 1 and 2 already allowed new fans to play the originals, and now the success of the anime has also caught any new potential fans up to speed on the story. I think the best bet would be to finish the story now with the momentum that Shenmue currently has, and then consider remaking the originals.
 
We barely have faith of a S4. A remake of 1 & 2 its absolutely impossible. Plus, it will have the graphics and gameplay of S3, and a lot of people disliked it. So we will turn two masterpieces in something worst than nobody wanted and didnt get any new fans.

The port to pc was enough. We dont need anything else of the first 2 games.
 
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