Marketing Shenmue III

Wickio

Wickio

Joined
Aug 21, 2018
EDIT: @Araviel OP that prompted the topic:

Inspired by the conversation by @tomboz@Wickio and @Kyo_JP, as well as the heart warming topic of all of our favorite media releases on Shenmue III, this is the place to discuss the marketing of Shenmue III as you would love it to be (ideas) and even want to contribute to (create, manage, coordinate).

What would you love to see done in the marketing of Shenmue III? What will you or can you help out with?

No discussion on what's been a mess up here, please, we all know and it is being discussed ad nauseum elsewhere.

Enjoy!

For what it's worth, I'd love to see a "What's Shenmue?" series similar to the "Forging the Dragon" series that Yakuza Fan produced.
 
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Wickio said:
For what it's worth, I'd love to see a "What's Shenmue?" series similar to the "Forging the Dragon" series that Yakuza Fan produced.
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Can we build it in 3 months? I can edit in Premiere and Final Cut, but we will also need A LOT ducmentation, someone redacting it and someone with a nice voice doing the voice over it. I can help with all of that except the voice over, not sure about how people will receive an english voice over with Spanish accent xD
 
Kyo_JP said:
Can we build it in 3 months? I can edit in Premiere and Final Cut, but we will also need A LOT ducmentation, someone redacting it and someone with a nice voice doing the voice over it. I can help with all of that except the voice over, not sure about how people will receive an english voice over with Spanish accent xD
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I’d be happy to voice such a project if people have no objections to a British accent. Got a fairly decent recording set-up over here and could quite easily fabricate a pop shield and mudguard.

I kind of feel like we would need some extra footage from the new game though. Not sure that footage from a game that’s nearly twenty years old is going to sell the game too well.
 
tomboz said:
I’d be happy to voice such a project if people have no objections to a British accent. Got a fairly decent recording set-up over here and could quite easily fabricate a pop shield and mudguard.

I kind of feel like we would need some extra footage from the new game though. Not sure that footage from a game that’s nearly twenty years old is going to sell the game too well.
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A lot of footage, documentatio, pre production documents, to script a story in at lest 1 big video or 3 to 5 depending on the focusing, what do we want to tell. It is not an easy project. Now that I remember, we hopefully will see the Adam Sipione documentary before the game release, to see that in a major platform like Netflix or something could help a lot
 
Kyo_JP said:
A lot of footage, documentatio, pre production documents, to script a story in at lest 1 big video or 3 to 5 depending on the focusing, what do we want to tell. It is not an easy project. Now that I remember, we hopefully will see the Adam Sipione documentary before the game release, to see that in a major platform like Netflix or something could help a lot
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I think we’d need to look at the history of the series, the events of the first few games and then the new game itself. If done correctly, it could be written as a single narrative with a few logical cutting points so as to be easily broken down into smaller bite sized chunks. I’d envisage it being three to five short videos (no more than five minutes each) that can be cut together into a single 20 minute video.

I think it would really need to explain why Shenmue was special at the time of its release (something that perhaps is not evident to people who play the original games today) while also explaining the story well enough for new players to be able to jump straight into three.

If we’re serious about this I could potentially get in touch with YSNet about getting some interviews with the dev team as I’m living about an hour away from where their office is based. My camera equipment is all in England though, so would have to figure something out.
 
Inspired by the conversation by @tomboz @Wickio and @Kyo_JP, as well as the heart warming topic of all of our favorite media releases on Shenmue III, this is the place to discuss the marketing of Shenmue III as you would love it to be (ideas) and even want to contribute to (create, manage, coordinate).

What would you love to see done in the marketing of Shenmue III? What will you or can you help out with?

No discussion on what's been a mess up here, please, we all know and it is being discussed ad nauseum elsewhere.

Enjoy!
 
I recently got a Drawing Tablet, so I am hoping to colour up my Shenmue III Drawing I showed a while back - Not making any promises, as I will need to get used to how it all works, but I'm going to use that as my basis of practice!

Maybe we could put a trailer featuring snippets of a line or two from members of the Forum? Just summarising why Shenmue III IS the big deal it is for all of us!
 
Vivi-gamer said:
I recently got a Drawing Tablet, so I am hoping to colour up my Shenmue III Drawing I showed a while back - Not making any promises, as I will need to get used to how it all works, but I'm going to use that as my basis of practice!

Maybe we could put a trailer featuring snippets of a line or two from members of the Forum? Just summarising why Shenmue III IS the big deal it is for all of us!
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I like the idea of a fast paced montage (something along the lines of ‘the reason I love Shenmue is...’), although I’m a little conscious of the fact that most of are probably on our thirties at this point which may not be a strong selling point when it comes to attracting new fans to the series. We’d have to make sure to include some younger voices in there too, but having fans from all over the world on this forum is definitely a selling point and something we could utilize.

I think our biggest issue is going to be visuals. We need to sell a new game using visuals mainly taken from old games, which won’t be easy. Thankfully the re-release looks a little better than the originals in places and there are definitely scenes that still hold up today.

First step should be deciding exactly what should be included and then we can look into sourcing it.

I think if we can put together a solid plan, we could potentially get access to Yu Suzuki and hopefully some additional footage and insight into the new game.
 
Given the ADHD short attention span of today's culture and even up to today having media and gamers calling the game Shenmuu-ehh, I guess I'd like every fan out there to spread compressed montage videos (with minimum talking preferably) of what Shenmue is all about on Youtube and Twitter. Like every time anyone I meet and asks me what Shenmue 3 is or why I like it so much, I just show them the following videos and ask them if they find it interesting:

1999/2001...

18 years later...

And instantly it really seems to grab their interest by them stating stuff like the series feels epic and now they kinda understand all the fuss about the games. I say let the imagery and music speak for themselves.
 
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So I’ve given it a little more thought and propose making four or five videos under the working title of ‘What’s Shenmue’.

  1. ‘The impact of Shenmue.’ A video highlighting all of the things that made the original games great. This would be narrated using short audio clips from members of the fan base explaining what elements of the original games they loved and why. It would be played over footage from the HD remakes with each section using a different piece of Shenmue music. Some of the areas discussed may include things like combat, music, characters, environments, freedom and immersion.
  2. ‘The story of Shenmue’. A video highlighting key points from the story so far. It will include character summaries of key characters from the first two games that are known or likely to appear in Shenmue 3 (Ryo, Ren, Lan Di, Shenhua and Chai) as and when these characters are introduced to the story. This video would be for people new to the series and serve as a catchup so they could jump straight in to S3 without needing to play through the first two games.
  3. ‘The history of Shenmue’. This would focus on the development of the series looking more into the technical side of things and discussing the impact that the original games had on modern gaming (in terms of innovations), a look at the period when the series was in hiatus and the eventual Kickstarter campaign (we could include fan reaction here with people explaining how they felt when the Kickstarter was announced and how they are feeling now ahead of S3s release). We could also give a brief overview of YS and the projects he worked on before beginning work on Shenmue.
  4. ‘The future of Shenmue’. A look at the development of S3 and an idea of what people can expect.
  5. I think these four videos could then be edited together into a long form documentary style piece upon competition if needed.
I’d be happy to take on a lot of the work in terms of scripting and story boarding, but as I sold off my edit rig when I moved out to Japan, we would need people who can edit and people willing to share their thoughts on the original games that can also record audio to a decent standard. Aside from these things, any video captured from the HD releases would be very useful (although I could capture this if needed as I brought my El gato over here with me for another project).

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.

Edit: I have edited this post to include the thoughts and opinions of other posters and will continue to do so as the project progresses.
 
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Given how long ago the series has started and that probably a significant portion of today's gaming generation has never played these games, I think it's important for marketing to highlight the heritage, how far the series has come and where it is going.

What would be cool to illustrate that is to have a marketing video that would show a world map and retrace Ryo's steps - zooming in on each area to detail the main events. And finish by highlighting the main locations involved in Shenmue 3, and possibly even tease further locations that might be relevant to future games. I think this would give the series as a whole a strong sense of place, which is important for something that spans such a long time period. And as someone not familiar with the geography in that part of the world it is hard to really understand the extent of Ryo's journey.
 
Would love to record a short selfie video on my phone of a few reasons why I adore Shenmue. Easy enough with today's tech.
 
I think a marketing campaign that focuses on how it’s been 18 years in the making, broke crowdfunding world records, and has a huge and devoted fan base, etc... maybe even a little bit on the history of Yu Suzuki games everyone knows and played... would build some much needed hype as we try to attract new people to the series.
 
tomboz said:
So I’ve given it a little more thought and propose making four videos.

  1. ‘Why I love Shenmue.’ A video highlighting all of the things that made the original games great. This would be narrated using short audio clips from members of the fan base played over footage from the HD remakes. It would focus on things like combat, music, characters, visuals and general gameplay.
  2. Shenmue 1 and 2 recap. A video highlighting key points from the story so far. It would also include character summaries of key characters likely to appear in Shenmue 3 (Ryo, Ren, Lan Di and Shenhua). This video would be for people new to the series and serve as a catchup so they could jump straight in to S3 without needing to play through the first two games.
  3. What’s Shenmue. This would focus on the development of the series looking more into the technical side of things and discussing the impact that the original games had on modern gaming (in terms of innovations), a look at the period when the series was in hiatus and the eventual Kickstarter campaign.
  4. Shenmue 3. A look at the development and what people can expect.
  5. I think these four videos could then be edited together into a long form documentary style piece upon competition if needed.
I’d be happy to take on a lot of the work in terms of scripting and story boarding, but as I sold off my edit rig when I moved out to Japan, we would need someone who can edit and people willing to share their thoughts on the original games that can also record audio to a decent standard. Aside from these things, any video captured from the HD releases would be very useful (although I could capture this if needed as I brought my El gato over here with me for another project).

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.
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This is incredible! There are plenty of tech savvy folks here that can help out. We should have high quality shots of gameplay from the modded streams too.

The four videoes you propose would work excellent one by one (for spreading across SoMe for simple access) and also then together as a longer piece. This is so exciting! We could even edit the full length down to a 3 minute trailer with 1, 2 and 3 featured.
 
I like the sound of a large-scale fan collaborated "Why I love Shenmue"" video.

I'd also probably add in there "Why I'm excited for Shenmue 3 / Why I'm thankful to YS Net" to present the other side of the argument.
 
Araviel said:
This is incredible! There are plenty of tech savvy folks here that can help out. We should have high quality shots of gameplay from the modded streams too.

The four videoes you propose would work excellent one by one (for spreading across SoMe for simple access) and also then together as a longer piece. This is so exciting! We could even edit the full length down to a 3 minute trailer with 1, 2 and 3 featured.
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I'll second this @tomboz if you get these done let us know and we can push them on the dojo social media channels.
 
To the people working on this and maybe having some difficulty describing Shenmue with their own words, this video essay might help as it describes well some of the design and mechanics of what make the series unique:


The Shenmue bit starts at 5:30 but it's worth to watch the entire thing.
*I might have posted this before, not sure, but oh well...
 
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