110 Industries & Yu Suzuki

Through owning a shenmue server, I've seen large concentrations of shenmue fans the uk as well as countries in europe such as portugal and the like. Although my server is english so maybe there is a bias and Japanese people don't join lmao.
 
If we just look at the different Amazon regional pages
and search for the latest regional Shenmue game releases (Shenmue 3 and HD Remaster)
you can see that the german, french, italian and .com language versions
have more user reviews than the japanese versions.
For example the german language versions have about 1734 user reviews,
while the japanese language versions have about 859 user reviews.

But there are 126 mil people in Japan and about 94 mil people in Germany + Austria.
About 1556 french user reviews, about 1875 italian language user reviews,
about 694 spanish language user reviews, about 618 UK user reviews, about 2913 .com user reviews.
(international version reviews not included)

If we take that as a comparison, there are way more popular language versions than japanese.
Yet Japan has a way higher population than any of these EU countries. (by a lot)
 
Tosh said:
If we just look at the different Amazon regional pages
and search for the latest regional Shenmue game releases (Shenmue 3 and HD Remaster)
you can see that the german, french, italian and .com language versions
have more user reviews than the japanese versions.
For example the german language versions have about 1734 user reviews,
while the japanese language versions have about 859 user reviews.

But there are 126 mil people in Japan and about 94 mil people in Germany + Austria.
About 1556 french user reviews, about 1875 italian language user reviews,
about 694 spanish language user reviews, about 618 UK user reviews, about 2913 .com user reviews.
(international version reviews not included)

If we take that as a comparison, there are way more popular language versions than japanese.
Yet Japan has a way higher population than any of these EU countries. (by a lot)
Click to expand...
Yeah but do Japanese people use Amazon in the amount Europeans do? Maybe they got their own Amazon. Idk, Amajapan? Lol
 
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Sput Vas Normandy said:
Yeah but do Japanese people use Amazon in the amount Europeans do? Maybe they got their own Amazon. Idk, Amajap? Lol
Click to expand...


"There are three major e-commerce platforms in Japan: Rakuten, the most veteran platform, founded in 1997, has accumulated a substantial following of 51.4 million active users in April 2020 and earned the equivalent of €29.6 billion in 2020. Yahoo Japan shopping began in 1999 and hasn’t built as great a customer base, but is 29.4 million users strong with a €6.76 billion revenue in 2020. Finally, Japanese online shoppers are turning to the newest platform of the three more than ever: Amazon. Started in Japan in 2000, Amazon Japan has the highest user base, with 52.5 million active users and a revenue of €25.8 billion in 2020."

Also you have to remember that all of these EU countries have other online shopping sites as well.
Like Media Markt, Saturn and all of these local shops and pretty much all of them offer online shopping too.
So i dont think the ratio would change that much if we include this stuff on top
and look at it by population.

Think about it, who published this japanese game called Shenmue 3?
Some big japanese publisher or some japanese AA publisher?
No, it was published by a austrian german company
and it was announced on a english speaking event.
 
Tosh said:
"There are three major e-commerce platforms in Japan: Rakuten, the most veteran platform, founded in 1997, has accumulated a substantial following of 51.4 million active users in April 2020 and earned the equivalent of €29.6 billion in 2020. Yahoo Japan shopping began in 1999 and hasn’t built as great a customer base, but is 29.4 million users strong with a €6.76 billion revenue in 2020. Finally, Japanese online shoppers are turning to the newest platform of the three more than ever: Amazon. Started in Japan in 2000, Amazon Japan has the highest user base, with 52.5 million active users and a revenue of €25.8 billion in 2020."

Also you have to remember that all of these EU countries have other online shopping sites as well.
Like Media Markt, Saturn and all of these local shops and pretty much all of them offer online shopping too.
So i dont think the ratio would change that much if we include this stuff on top
and look at it by population.

Think about it, who published this japanese game called Shenmue 3?
Some big japanese publisher or some japanese AA publisher?
No, it was published by a austrian german company
and it was announced on a english speaking event.
Click to expand...
Yes yes, like I said, I think the fanbase is bigger in Europe/America than Japan. Only said that I dont think it's based bc Amazon EU vs Amazon JP reviews
 
The series clearly has japanese fans too, no question.
But i dont think that Shenmue counts as a game that is clearly a japanese market game nowadays.
It was probably the plan first but then the EU and US market overtook the original japanese fanbase.
I mean, Shenmue The Animation, you know, a anime show of a japanese game,
wasnt even released in Japan first. It was a multi regional release. And it was funded by two american companies.

If you look for reaction stuff on Youtube for the E3 announcement,
like 98% of the reaction videos are from people from the west. Even if you search with kanji,
the japanese videos are just reposts of content from the west.

How many japanese comments did we see in the Kickstarter campaign compared to english, spanish etc.
Not that many. So i would say Shenmue is a japanese game series but mostly enjoyed by people
from the other side of the planet.
 
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If that were true then all three games would have been commercially successful and the future of the series wouldn’t be in doubt. Alas, pretty much all of the sales data we have suggests that the Shenmue games have always sold better in Japan than they have in the west, at least as a percentage of the total population, anyway.

Comparing things like comments, reviews and reaction videos assumes that Japanese people interact with games in exactly the same way as westerners do, which just isn’t the case. Likewise, even if these things did correlate directly with sales (which they don’t), looking only at Western sites like YouTube and Amazon rather than Japanese sites like Yahoo and NicoNico doesn’t paint a particularly accurate picture.

Sure, both Amazon and YouTube are popular in Japan, but they’re far from the only options. For example, views for some of the S3 announcement videos on NicoNico aren’t all that far off the number of views for the exact same videos on YouTube. Considering NicoNico views are pretty much all from people in Japan while the YouTube views come from people all over the world (including, as you mentioned, a lot of people in Japan), this too would suggest that Shenmue is more popular in Japan than it is elsewhere.

Of course, this is all somewhat irrelevant anyway, as this conversation seems to have sprouted from somebody asking whether a future Shenmue game is more likely to be announced at a western event or a Japanese one. With that in mind, I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to see why YSNet (a Japanese developer) and 110 Industries (a publisher who has shown an interest in the Japanese video game industry and is working closely with a Japanese developer on two of its three announced projects - possibly all three) might choose the biggest event in Japanese gaming to announce a collaboration (assuming, of course, that they are indeed working together).
 
Then why does all the effort to revive the series come from companies from the west?
The Sony guys that were responsible to get Shenmue 3 on stage werent japanese,
the S3 publisher and financial helping hand wasnt japanese,
the Shenmue HD Remaster was not a Sega Japan project and was not made by a japanese studio,
110 Industries is not a japanese publisher,
Crunchyroll and Adult Swim are not japanese companies,
all the special stuff like the newest Shenmue statue or the Shenmue 3 collectors items (Vinyl etc)
are made by companies from the west.

How come that for example Yakuza (Ryu Ga Gotoku) did fine in Japan
(they even still have Japan exclusive games in that series) with just the japanese audience for a long time
(i think it took the west a lot of time until Yakuza 6 was released to finally reach the Japan numbers)
and Sega would have probably just ignored the western market at some point in a worst case scenario,

yet Shenmue was not good enough for the Japan only market? They didnt even try to do something with it.
There are still tons of smaller and bigger japanese niche games, that are Japan exclusive
and dont even get translated into english.
If Shenmue is clearly a game for the japanese market in the first place, then why didnt they go with that path?
Why didnt they try to revive Shenmue at TGS?
Why did all of the effort and support in the past couple of years come from western companies?
Why would a austrian german company publish a game series that is clearly made for a japanese audience?
Why had a AA austrian german company the best offer / deal for Ys Net and not a japanese company?

Japan has one of the biggest gaming and entertaining market in general,
with some of the biggest publishers and studios. Yet all of the recent Shenmue support since 2015 or even before
to keep it alive comes from the west. Why would all these companies do their thing from the other side of the planet
if the main Shenmue audience is clearly japanese?
 
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Tosh said:
Then why does all the effort to revive the series come from companies from the west?
The Sony guys that were responsible to get Shenmue 3 on stage werent japanese,
the S3 publisher and financial helping hand wasnt japanese,
the Shenmue HD Remaster was not a Sega Japan project and was not made by a japanese studio,
110 Industries is not a japanese publisher,
Crunchyroll and Adult Swim are not japanese companies,
all the special stuff like the newest Shenmue statue or the Shenmue 3 collectors items (Vinyl etc)
are made by companies from the west.

How come that for example Yakuza (Ryu Ga Gotoku) did fine in Japan
(they even still have Japan exclusive games in that series) with just the japanese audience for a long time
(i think it took the west a lot of time until Yakuza 6 was released to finally reach the Japan numbers)
and Sega would have probably just ignored the western market at some point in a worst case scenario,

yet Shenmue was not good enough for the Japan only market? They didnt even try to do something with it.
There are still tons of smaller and bigger japanese niche games, that are Japan exclusive
and dont even get translated into english.
If Shenmue is clearly a game for the japanese market in the first place, then why didnt they go with that path?
Why did all of the effort and support in the past couple of years come from western companies?
Why would a austrian german company publish a game series that is clearly made for a japanese audience?
Why had a AA austrian german company the best offer / deal for Ys Net and not a japanese company?

Japan has one of the biggest gaming and entertaining market in general,
with some of the biggest publishers and studios. Yet all of the recent Shenmue support since 2015 or even before
to keep it alive comes from the west. Why would all these companies do their thing from the other side of the planet
if the main Shenmue audience is clearly japanese?
Click to expand...
Nowhere did I say that the main audience for Shenmue was Japanese. My point was that all three Shenmue games sold better in Japan than they did in the west based on population size and nothing you wrote here comes close to addressing that.

I can’t be bothered to dig out the exact figures, because as I said, this is something of a moot point, but Japanese sales of the first two Shenmue games accounted for around 33% of global sales despite Japan only being home to around 1.6% of the world’s population. Likewise, about 25% of week 1 sales for the HD rerelease were in Japan, even though the game cost almost twice as much here as it did in the west and released several months later, by which point many Japanese players had imported copies from elsewhere.

Sadly, we don’t have a lot of information about S3 sales, but what little we do have suggests that more than a quarter of early sales took place in Japan (a market that is both shrinking and heavily dominated by the Switch). By comparison, Japanese sales of a lot of the best-selling Switch games only tend to account for between 10 and 20 percent of global sales, which again highlights Shenmue’s disproportionate popularity out east.

As for the rest of your post, I’m really not sure what Yakuza nor some random merch has to do with anything (I could point out the fact that the JP post stamps and anime soundtrack are Japan exclusives, but why bother?), nor why we’re suddenly talking about Sony and Deep Silver.
 
The Sony, Deep Silver, merchandise, remaster points are important
because all of these companies are from the west.
I'm not saying that the EU or US market easily outsold the original japanese S1 or S2 release,
thats why i said nowadays,
but there is clearly a reason why pretty much all of the recent Shenmue content came from outside of Japan.
I doubt that EU and US companies would take care of all of this stuff, if Shenmue would have
a huge japanese audience ratio. Things that are released by US or EU companies
are mostly made for people within these regions.
Games with clearly japanese audiences as main target, are mainly made for japanese people in Japan.
Yet all of the latest Shenmue projects and effort came from outside of Japan.

And i only took Yakuza as example because there is a lot of Japan exclusive content, like games,
that are totally fine with just the japanese audience. So if the japanese Shenmue audience
is bigger than any other region, by population or willingly buying more copies,
why did nothing happen with the series at all for years and years and years
until all of these companies from the west came on board?

If we look back on page 68, the discussion was about how popular Shenmue is in Japan against the rest of the world
and judging by the silence until 2015, Ys Net reaching out for fans worldwide, a austrian german publisher with the best offer, how all of the Shenmue content then happened because of companies from the west, game reviews, clicks etc
then no, i dont think that Shenmue is most popular in Japan.

When it comes to the entertainment industry, the most content, updates, investments etc
are being made for regions where the content is most popular / requested.
So how is all of the latest Shenmue stuff, literally almost everything,
made and funded by international companies from outside of Japan if Shenmue is the most popular in Japan?
 
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Suddenly remembered having this same chat and the exotism factor triggered in western players arised iirc..
example: the soil colors catches my attention. And flora, clothing etc
 
Tosh said:
I'm not saying that the EU or US market easily outsold the original japanese S1 or S2 release,
thats why i said nowadays,
Click to expand...
So you’re saying that S3 sold better outside of Japan than it did in? Surely if that were the case then Japanese sales would have accounted for less than 1.6% of the total, right? That would mean that the game sold more than 1,125,000 copies worldwide in its first week. Amazing that It did so well without breaking into the top ten charts in any major market other than Japan!

Tosh said:
there is clearly a reason why pretty much all of the recent Shenmue content came from outside of Japan.
Click to expand...
Indeed there is. Sony (who, afaiaa, didn’t actually spend a penny on the project) got fed up of being hounded by Shenmue fans on Twitter every month and saw an opportunity to earn some free goodwill with the gaming community while Embracer/DS saw the success of the Kickstarter and thought they could make some easy money.

Tosh said:
Things that are released by US or EU companies
are mostly made for people within these regions.
Click to expand...
No they’re not. That’s why developers/publishers go to the effort of localizing their games for people all over the world. That’s also why DS signed off on the ridiculously convoluted gambling system that was seemingly designed solely to appease Chinese censors despite it making the game objectively worse for western audiences.[/quote]

Tosh said:
Yet all of the latest Shenmue projects and effort came from outside of Japan.
Click to expand...
Quite the opposite, actually. The bulk of Shenmue 3’s development was done by YS Net in Japan (with the rest taking place in India, I believe) and the anime was also produced here by a Japanese studio.

Tosh said:
So if the japanese Shenmue audience
is bigger than any other region, by population or willingly buying more copies,
why did nothing happen with the series at all for years and years and years
until all of these companies from the west came on board?
Click to expand...
Things only started happening because Yu decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign due to the support of the fan base and the success of the Mighty No. 9 campaign. Sony helped to promote the it, but the Kickstarter would have still happened even if Sony hadn’t provided a stage on which to announce it (though I doubt it would have been anywhere near as successful). By the time Deep Silver got involved Shenmue 3 was already funded and so I don’t think it could ever be argued that “nothing” had happened before they came on board.

It’s starting to sound as though your entire argument is that the combined population of North America and Europe is larger than the population of Japan, in which case, no shit, Sherlock. Using that logic, you could argue that just about any Japanese series is more popular in the West than it is in Japan, or even that bratwurst and sauerkraut are less popular in Austria and Germany than they are in the rest of the world.

The fact remains though, that when looking at total sales as a percentage of the total population, the data that we have suggests that Shenmue is significantly more popular in Japan than it is in North America or Europe. Pointing out that Japanese people don’t comment that much on English language websites (who would’ve thought?) isn’t going to change that.
 
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. 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?
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.
A publisher that has nothing to do with the japanese market. They dont even have a japanese Deep Silver studio
or a japanese Koch Media branch at that time.

You can literally scroll through the original Kickstarter comments
and there are 3 japanese comments within a pool of 1000 comments.

Also i didnt say that the Shenmue content didnt came from Japan,
i said that pretty much all of the company investments to make Shenmue content came from the west and not Japan.
As far as we know, Shenmue HD Remaster was a project by Sega EU, made by a british studio.
Which japanese company funded Shenmue 3? No company.
Yes, the anime was made in Japan and who was responsible for the project? Two US companies.
Which japanese company was responsible in offering their investments
just to please their big japanese audience? No one.

All of the updated Shenmue merchandise came from western companies.
I'm pretty sure that you know that most of the popular merchandise in terms of gaming and entertaining
in Japan, comes from Japan (or the asian regions) and not from the west.
So how does all of these western investments and effort fit into a scenario
where Shenmue clearly has the biggest audience and popularity in Japan?
Where are the big japanese investors? I mean clearly they want to get the money from the biggest Shenmue audience
or not?

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.

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.
 
There might be no Japanese publishers willing to take a risk on an IP like Shenmue, despite its "better sales" there, because it's simply not profitable enough to Japanese publishers; whereas companies like Deep Silver and possibly 110 seem to raise money from some fairly well-funded sources--and they seem to be located in tax-advantaged areas as well.
 
Let me preface this by mentioning I have no clue about any global sales figures of any recent Shenmue (re-)releases. To be frank, as far as I know we've only gotten some vague implications by people involved with the project that Shenmue 3 did somewhere between 'dissapointing' and 'okay' numbers.

That aside, it's easily possible that the Remasters and SIII sold best in Japan on a per-country basis and that number still being way too little to even consider a Japan-only future entry. Selling the most copies in Japan doesn't necessarily equal massive numbers or '60% of their sales' or anything like that. It may just as well mean something like 20% of their sales with the rest of the world making up the other 80%, but actually low per-country percentages. Keep in mind Shenmue games aren't exactly graphic novel budgeted titles where it can be assumed they'll still be profitable catering to a fraction of their initial market.

And for all we know that option may actually have been explored, just not publically.
 
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:

Shenmue IIx Sales.jpg


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:
Shenmue I & II Sales Australia PS4.png
 
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