Kickstarter for another part (that is not the finale) would probably only get to 1/3 of the amount of money
if we keep in mind that theres no big E3 stage anymore with millions of people live watching one main stage
and no guarantee that Sony would help the campaign again.
Shenmue is not a Sony IP and the Sony 2015 people arent there anymore,
so the new Sony could just say no thanks.
I think if Ys Net would actually believe in another KS success (enough money to actually make a full next part with it),
they would have already started it.
If Deep Silver would have been more than satisfied with the sales numbers,
they would have already started the Shenmue 4 development two years ago and we would have heard something by now.
We can forget the big names like Square, Ubisoft, Capcom and so on.
Theres a reason why Ys Net chose Deep Silver. Probably because there wasnt that much range in terms of publisher offers
or their own terms for a cooperation were pretty bad.
Which then leads to a new publisher in the same budget range / size as Deep Silver,
or below that. It is easy to downgrade from the AA 15-30 mil USD range
down to the budget of even smaller publishers.
But a upgrade will be much harder because there arent that many AA publishers
left that are funding these type of middle ground games and the jump to the AAA treatment is way too big.
How many decent AA open world game publishers do you guys know?
It would be much easier if Shenmue 4 would be a 7-12 hour long graphic novel game
or 1/2 the size of the Shenmue 1 map and no voice acting.
But open world style with new locations, NPCs, shops, story, decent graphics and full voice acting etc,
thats not a good combination with a budget that maybe cant even be considered to be on AA level.
If we throw away the full voice acting and kind of decent graphics
we could get something on the same level as Deadly Premonition.
But its going to be very very very hard to get a budget to surpass
Shenmue 3's graphics, voice acting, world design and so on
and i have no idea which publisher would gave them these ressources to upgrade everything.
We are talking about these typical middle ground games like Shenmue 3, Kingdom Come, Biomutant,
Elex, Darksiders 3, Dynasty Warriors, Deadly Premonition ...
and these type of games will always come with some quality restrictions
because they are in this weird space where the game is huge but the budget isnt.
Short, good graphics, not open world, no voice acting
and more gameplay than story, like the new game Stray - not a big problem
Long, a lot of story, open world but only cutscene voice acting
and below average graphics like Deadly Premonition - its possible
Long, a lot of story, open world, fully voice acted, good graphics
but the budget isnt bigger than the budget of the other two examples? - trouble is going to be inevitable
There is no way around that, except if some first party publisher on the 60-90 mil USD budget level
is going to fund the whole thing. The size and scale of Shenmue will always be a main problem
because that stuff is not cheap.