It irks me a little bit that you see Yu with all these industry insiders and developers in social media posts, yet none of them are helping him to get Shenmue made. They have connections, they say how much Shenmue meant to them and inspired them and they obviously consider him a big influence of the industry. But they do jack shit lol.
I think the gaming industry nowadays is simply too big in terms of costs, risks and so on.
I mean, why do we have 500 Assassins Creed, Fifa, CoD, Souls Like, Open World Action RPG etc games?
Because thats the stuff that can compensate the budget costs because it sells really well.
If you want to make a blockbuster type of game, then youre easily looking at a budget of 80+ mil USD.
And as sad as it sounds, but no publisher is going to spend that kind of money
on a japanese story game set in China. Yes, there are a lot of bad AAA games
where you could say that if its okay to make bad AAA games,
then why dont they give a new AAA Shenmue a chance instead?
But even the bad AAA games are all about battles, shooting, style, effects, blood, loot and so on.
Thats probably the reason why they got the green light from the publisher.
All of the stuff that isnt Shenmue.
Then below that, we can look at the AA market, so around 25-45 mil USD maybe,
thats probably more realistic. But here is the next problem:
There actually arent many AA publishers and Shenmue as a concept doesnt really suit any of them.
A lot of AA publishers are european and Shenmue probably isnt even on their radar
and the whole Shenmue 3 order of events probably didnt help either in terms of interest from other publishers.
On the asian side, you can forget Square Enix, Capcom and all of those.
Koei Tecmo could be a match but they wont make a Shenmue game.
There is another good match, a publisher with a series of games with most of them probably being in AA budget range ...
the Yakuza series from Sega. But ... yeah ... nothing to talk about here.
Below that is just the indie market and Shenmues concept is going to be a real problem here
because nobody is going to develop a 3D open world story game
with day & night cycles, changing weather, fully voiced npcs, daily routines, cutscenes
and all of that Shenmue stuff on a indie budget. The world of Shenmue doesnt suit the concept of a indie game.
Yes there are super successful indie games like Stardew Valley
but these games are not expensive to develop and arent made by a big team.
Its not comparable with ressources you need for a full Shenmue game
We saw how Shenmue 3 looked with the help of a european AA publisher.
Shenmue 4 isnt going to magically look 10 times as good with the same range of budget.
Thats if we even find a new publisher in this budget range,
otherwise theres nothing other left than a real downgrade in terms of scale, graphics and so on
and even Yu Suzuki probably doesnt want to do that.
So i think the only realistic scenario that makes the most sense to get a real Shenmue game,
is to find another AA publisher. But which one?
Judging by the time that has passed now, it seems like no other AA publisher made any offers.
So i honestly dont know what to do now.