We can all agree that Deep Silver didnt have the best marketing campaign ever
and that it was shady to make it Epic exclusive and all that stuff. Yeah, that wasnt perfect at all.
Can we blame Deep Silver for magazines and websites using old assets, screenshots etc
for their posts, news and articles?
Not fully, no. All of this stuff was probably available and stored for the press on some PR website.
If these magazines and websites would have researched for 30 seconds,
they would have seen that those screenshots and videos are old.
Simply by looking at what was shown in the last couple of weeks / months. You just need two working eyes to see that.
So we can blame Deep Silver for whenever they used outdated footage, sure, but not for all the other websites
and magazines on this planet doing the same thing. All of us were easily able to tell what kind of content
wasnt up to date anymore, so why werent the journalists able to see that?
Even if somehow for some unknown reason the updated material wasnt available to them,
they could have easily made screenshots from the latest trailer instead of using material from 2019.
Deep Silver is not gonna verify the content of every news article, that makes no sense.
Also i think that we fans make a way bigger deal out of this than it actually was.
All the haters and people who never were interested in Shenmue just got more content to hate on
but they never were interested in buying the game in the first place ... so ...
Were really all of these Epic PC haters gonna buy the game if it would have been available on Steam day one?
Like all of the hundreds of thousands comments on the internet? So judging by that,
Shenmue 3 would have been one of the biggest releases ever on Steam, right? Come on ...
Did Deep Silver force Ys Net to implement a stamina feature, how the game should end,
how the characters should look like, what kind of engine they should use or any of this stuff? No.
Why would they? Did anyone ever hear anything about Deep Silver dictating Warhorse Studios
how to make Kingdom Come Deliverance, or dictating 4A Games how to make Metro,
or dictating Nine Dots how to make Outward ... no?
As far as i can see, there never was any big controversy at all with Deep Silver
when it comes to publishing games in terms of developers being angry because they ruined their project.
Sure, they canceled Dead Island 2 a couple of times
but Dead Island is a Deep Silver IP, thats not comparable with a third party publishing deal like Shenmue.
Who paid for the Gamescom booths, the live stream events, the interview videos in Japan,
who invited the journalists to play it and stuff like that? It was Koch Media (parent company of Deep Silver)
Deep Silver allowed Ys Net to delay the release multiple times.
And as i said, there are literally Yu Suzuki interviews where Deep Silver wasnt on board yet
or were they just announced that they are on board
and Yu Suzuki literally told the interviewers about all that different stuff
that he isnt sure about if they are gonna be able to add that with the budget they have.
And then surprisingly we pretty much got all of that in the final game after Deep Silver came on board.
I wonder who paid for all of it? Maybe some anonymous donator from Sony ...
or it was the multi platform company that agreed to publish the game ... ?
Was it Deep Silver who forced Yu Suzuki to skip a release on Xbox? No.
Pretty much all of Deep SIlvers games are multi platform, so PC, PS and Xbox.
And same case again, there are literally interviews where Yu Suzuki stated
that he wants to honor Sonys help at E3 by making Shenmue 3 a PS console exclusive game.
Why would Deep Silver make it PS exclusive, that makes no sense for a third party multi platform publisher.
We literally got MORE game because of Deep Silver, not less.
If you look at it from a neutral standpoint, i have no idea how anyone can come to the conclusion
that we got a downgraded or more restricted or worse game because of Deep Silver.