- Joined
- Aug 22, 2018
I think you’re potentially reading into this a little too much. If Deep Silver don’t want to continue working on the series, they don’t owe anybody an explanation. They’re a publicly traded company and as such, the only people they have any obligation to are their shareholders. Manipulating the narrative of a shareholder event to try and tarnish the image of a game which, in all likelihood, the vast majority of their shareholders have never heard of seems like both negligence and overkill.The whole thing is odd. I was talking to some other members in the community this morning and one raised a very good point, is this Deep Silver effectively trying to cut ties but saying nope didn't do well enough goodbye, even though sales might not have been as bad as implied.
It then begs the question why did they come on board. The major point was notoriety but I don't think they quite realised the work needed around this game to make it a success. Couple that with projections that seem stupid given the fact this was majority funded by a Kickstarter and there you have your figures. Of course the actual presentation may be very different, though I suspect it's not met their targets given the estimates we've made here, which seem OTT. E.g the re-releases sold between 250k-350k across all platforms if rumours are true. So to have upto 250k (of course we don't know for sure) as a projection for 1 quarter seems mental.
We won't throw in the towel. There's more to this than meets the eye IMO
One could perhaps argue that common courtesy would require them to provide Yu Suzuki with a reason as to why they want to sever the relationship, but Yu Suzuki should be well aware of the actual sales numbers and will probably have spoken at length with Deep Silver as to what their expectations were for Shenmue 3 at various points before and during production. Putting on a show to justify the game’s failure to meet these expectations seems pointless when Yu Suzuki is likely already aware of whether or not the game has lived up to expectations.