Shenmue IV Will Happen - Here's Why!

[Seaman]

The company is very lucky they have Persona, Yakuza and Sonic to always fall back on, otherwise, they would go out of business very quickly.

If ones think about it, now is "Sega does what Nintendoes". Playing safe with Mario, Zelda and Pokemon while yet another port of x legacy title.
Personally I believe there's always been two Segas in every branch -no matter japanese, american or european- the creative which is cool and restrained by what they're allowed from above (doing 3D in sprite hardware? Ok challenge accepted) and the business part which is messy messy messy. Example of Sega business division doing their thing:
- We are working in a SUPERGAME.
A year passes:
- In reality It was codename for several independent titles haha but it will feature the BLOCKCHAIN.
Another year passes:
- We were just joking. We lost interest in blockchain, supergame and we're sticking to our actual flag titles.
This chain of events gave me the Saturn vibes very hard.

 

[Suzaku]

If ones think about it, now is "Sega does what Nintendoes". Playing safe with Mario, Zelda and Pokemon while yet another port of x legacy title.
Personally I believe there's always been two Segas in every branch -no matter japanese, american or european- the creative which is cool and restrained by what they're allowed from above (doing 3D in sprite hardware? Ok challenge accepted) and the business part which is messy messy messy. Example of Sega business division doing their thing:
- We are working in a SUPERGAME.
A year passes:
- In reality It was codename for several independent titles haha but it will feature the BLOCKCHAIN.
Another year passes:
- We were just joking. We lost interest in blockchain, supergame and we're sticking to our actual flag titles.
This chain of events gave me the Saturn vibes very hard.

Yeah, they didn't have any real play for the super games, outside "let's invest big money to make the gamble of our life".
They planned something like $600 million iirc for the whole super games projects, probably a new console would cost less for real and have waaaaay more chance to succeed.

This instead is just a gamble like any other live service project, and with the over saturated market, it's only a plan for failure.

They said that the super game plan was backed the higher ups inside the company, so imagine their meeting:


-we need a plan for the nest years, what we can do?
-we could invest more in traditional games like Capcom, the ones that are bringing us money
-we could return to be a console maker
OR
-we could invest more money in mobile and live services, chasing trend that are already in decline (angry birds, battle royale...).


Sega always had bad bad marketing departments but at leats they invested on the real things when needed, but the Sammy ones are terrible and just waste money.

 

[iknifaugood]

Shenmue 3 made profit though.

Games that make money get sequels.

you're right about not giving up on voice acting and 3D enviroments, that's some of the features that makes "Shenmue", and of course those have a cost.
But fans can accept to not have English dub for example, that is a acceptable sacrifice.

Shenmue does not make enough money to cover the costs associated with giant 3D worlds with full voice acting.

About Yakuza, they release a game every year, even if the profits are lower of course compared to a AAA FPS, in the space of 10 years they will release 10 games (semplification) vs 1 single FPS game.
In the long run, maybe 10 Yakuza game can even have an advantange over one single big FPS that in 10 years can also suffer a decline.

Yakuza games still cost money to develop ($20-30M a pop) and are only modest hits (reliably selling around 1M units, give or take).

In any case Hyenas was cancelled and generated a HUGE loss, and it showed that it wasn't a good idea at all.

Apex Legends released in 2019 and, as of 2022, made $2 billion. No, spending $100M to get into that market was not a bad idea. That it didn't pan out does not mean that it was ill advised.

I don't know, the market was already saturated in 2020, and these kind of projects are literally a gamble.
If you win, you win big and you'll have your own fortnite, but that's less than 1%
99% you'll end like this, a cancelled project, discontinued service after some years, sales decline, huge losses and in some case even barkruptcy.

Every major publisher has a big FPS under their belt so it makes sense for Sega to want to throw their hat in that ring. Even Splatoon 3 made $200M in Japan alone (though technically not an FPS, it's as close as Nintendo is going to get). Big publishers with big money can usually take the gamble out of these sorts of things but, as I said, it's the nature of the genre to require significant upfront costs.

Personally I would never green light something like that, it's less risky to just release a new console...

No, it's not. Game consoles are sold at a loss and even Microsoft is nearing a breaking point.

 

[iknifaugood]

Not releasing HYENAS was a complete waste of effort and money. If they're going to waste as much as they did, they may as well be putting a fraction of it into Shenmue and getting some return on it, even if it only just "breaks even". That's the point.

No doubt cancelling Hyenas was a terrible embarrassment for Sega but they obviously did not greenlight the project with the intention of cancelling it, and the potential yields on their investment make a lot more sense than the kind of marginal "profits" from a game like Shenmue (which is not guaranteed). You're making it seem like they wasted money on purpose.

 

[Suzaku]

Games that make money get sequels.

True, big publishers are looking for big money usually, so a modest success sometime is not enough for them.
But Shenmue 3 still made money, and for a medium publisher (or a new unknown publisher) that could be interesting.

Shenmue does not make enough money to cover the costs associated with giant 3D worlds with full voice acting.

Shenmue 3 was able to profit while providing all this.
It's a matter of balance.

Yakuza games still cost money to develop ($20-30M a pop) and are only modest hits (reliably selling around 1M units, give or take).

Yakuza games cost around $10m, RGG Studio is a well oiled machine that can make these kind of games every year and mantain very low costs, of course sometime the reused assets are a bit too much, but still...
That's why they are happy even with sales lower than 500k, but nowadays they do much more.

Apex Legends released in 2019 and, as of 2022, made $2 billion. No, spending $100M to get into that market was not a bad idea. That it didn't pan out does not mean that it was ill advised.

For 1 Apex Legend, how many other games failed?
Also Sega West doesn't have any real experience with live services or the online FPS multiplayer genre, in fact it resulted in an adrift project that ended up being cancelled.
If was a bad idea.

Every major publisher has a big FPS under their belt so it makes sense for Sega to want to throw their hat in that ring. Even Splatoon 3 made $200M in Japan alone (though technically not an FPS, it's as close as Nintendo is going to get). Big publishers with big money can usually take the gamble out of these sorts of things but, as I said, it's the nature of the genre to require significant upfront costs.

The question is, could Sega take the gamble?
Of course they have the money, but if you fail you must be prepared for the consequences (creative assembly and sega europe will be now downsized, that will hit future business capacity too), and sega as a medium sized company has no backups:
No more consoles, no more club sega arcades, pachinko suffers...
They have only the console business, toys and animation that are profitable and keep the company in the green.
Another idiotic move like Hyenas and we say goodbye to the consumer business.

If they want to "suicide" fine, but at least give us a new console, not a stupid online memeFPS that no one wants.

No, it's not. Game consoles are sold at a loss and even Microsoft is nearing a breaking point.

Nintendo consoles aren't sold at loss.
Sega could do the same, you don't need cutting edge performances to succeed.
It will surely be less risky than these live services "super games".

 

[iknifaugood]

True, big publishers are looking for big money usually, so a modest success sometime is not enough for them.
But Shenmue 3 still made money, and for a medium publisher (or a new unknown publisher) that could be interesting.

Without knowing the exact amount of money that Shenmue 3 made or sales figures, we have no way of knowing for sure how modest the success was. We know that, after 4 years, Shenmue 4 is nowhere to be found and Suzuki's next game was a mobile arcade game. That tells you everything you need to know.

Shenmue 3 was able to profit while providing all this.
It's a matter of balance.

Shenmue 3 cost around $20M after all was said and done and ~$7M of that was from KS (with some fans paying several thousands of dollars extra); take that away and what does Shenmue's "profit" look like?

Yakuza games cost around $10m, RGG Studio is a well oiled machine that can make this kind of game every year and mantain very low costs, of course sometime the reused assets are a bit too much, but still...
That's why they are happy even with sales lower than 500k, but nowadays they do much more.

You're suggesting that Yakuza games are made for half the budget that it took to make Shenmue 3?

For 1 Apex Legend, how many other games failed?

It's still a massive market. Rainbow 6, Overwatch, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, Destiny, Valorant, Fortnite etc. are all viable money printers for YEARS off the initial investment. To say nothing of smaller games like PUBG, Warframe, Escape from Tarkov, and even Battlebit Remastered just came out and did amazing numbers. And FPS games have been the biggest market for decades at this point so it's hard to say how "saturated" it is.

Of course they have the money, but if you fail you must be prepared for the consequences (creative assembly and sega europe will be now downsized), and sega as a medium sized company has no backups:

Of course they have to downsize but they also had to upsize in order to develop the game. Sega had a string of moderate enough successes that they wanted to shoot for a big hit and it didn't pan out. That's just the way it goes sometimes. What publishers don't do is greenlight "slightly profitable" games in perpetuity. Publishers generally expect an ROI of around 2 to 3 times the budget depending on the size/scope of the project and they always recoup the budget before rev split.

Also Sega West doesn't have any real experience with live services or the online FPS multiplayer genre, in fact it resulted in an adrift project that ended up being cancelled.

Nintendo never made a shooter before Splatoon and it sold very well. Same with Blizzard and Overwatch.

Nintendo consoles aren't sold at loss.
Sega could do the same, you don't need cutting edge performances to succeed.
It will surely be less risky than these live services "super games".

Nintendo are the only ones and they can only afford to do that because of their extensive library of games/exclusives. You think a lot of people are going to buy a console just for Sonic? Also, you want to talk about upfront costs? $100M is nothing compared to what it would take to develop and release a brand new console.

 

[thedemon1238]

Not sure if Sammy-sega can build the hardware like steam deck, but they can always do a deal with some companies like ASUS. Instead of ASUS ROG Ally, the Steam deck clone could be called Asus SEGA. They may find other companies for laptops and mini computers. For example, Lenovo SEGA. I can totally see it.

Let players install their own choice of Windows or Linux. GOG, Epic store, steam, emulators...whatever they like. SEGA don't even need to do anything except licensing the brand. Lenovo will do the support, etc. SEGA fans don't need much and will be very happy with such a device. I'm going to install a ton of SEGA classics and even some new games!

Sammy-SEGA just love to use flashy words like "Super Game" . I'm not sure if you guys remember a few years ago.

SEGA "Fog Gaming" Cloud Gaming Service Revealed

The teased revolutionary tech-related scoop in the latest issue of Famitsu is SEGA's cloud gaming service called Fog Gaming

wccftech.com

They called this thing "The Future of Gaming", "Something that will fundamentally change the gaming industry" Finally it turned out that this thing is something that allow you to "play arcade games" online from home... or something like that. Later they sold the Arcade business entirely. Too much talk for great achievements, but nothing realized.

After the Hyena fiasco, I'm seriously starting to think there's something wrong with the current SEGA. They make many simple mistakes while the right decisions are in front of them. Like Shenmue 4.

 

[Seaman]

Not sure if Sammy-sega can build the hardware like steam deck, but they can always do a deal with some companies like ASUS. Instead of ASUS ROG Ally, the Steam deck clone could be called Asus SEGA. They may find other companies for laptops and mini computers. For example, Lenovo SEGA. I can totally see it.

SEGA Thermomix. We had PSX BBQ so its possible.

 

[Sonoshee]

No doubt cancelling Hyenas was a terrible embarrassment for Sega but they obviously did not greenlight the project with the intention of cancelling it, and the potential yields on their investment make a lot more sense than the kind of marginal "profits" from a game like Shenmue (which is not guaranteed). You're making it seem like they wasted money on purpose.

Of course they wasted money on purpose. Why would you cancel it right before it was ready to launch? It makes absolutely no sense at all and it's a terrible decision. At least release it and get some ROI.
Kind frankly I'm sick to death of your attitude toward Shenmue. Sega owe it to the fans to see one of their own IPs out. If they have enough money to throw at cancelled projects as big as HYENAS, they have enough money to give Shenmue the ending it deserves and at a fraction of those cost.

 

[thedemon1238]

Iknifaugood, we don't know the exact sales, but it's kind of easy to guess.

Kickstarter is 7,000,000, but rewards production, shipping and sega license is probably 2-3,000,000. Deep silver money is rumored to be 10,000,000, then they take back 5,000,000 for "the epic deal"…. Maybe they even get more from EPIC when shenmue were free in the epic store for Christmas. We don't know how much money Shibuya production invested in the game. Maybe Sony threw some money too, even if it wasn't much. When you calculate the production of physical copies, marketing and all the other work that Deep Silver did to publishing the game .... There's no way they didn't get their investment back + some profit. We've heard from deep silver that the game performed "fine", even it is not a big hit. We don't know if Epic and Shibuya are happy with their investment, but I hope they are. :)

For "real" development, YSnet may have had about 10 million, but not all at once in the beginning. The scale of the game has changed on the fly. It is also known that 60-70 percent of the creation of the game was spent "tinkering and learning Unreal Engine". (I've heard something like that somewhere.Not sure is it correct.) They did a great job in my opinion, despite the circumstances.

Someone who knows the real numbers is probably laughing at me right now, but these are my thoughts. We'll never know the numbers precisely because of the NDA.

 

[spud1897]

This isn't really accurate. Hyenas was a game in a popular genre made by a hit studio; unfortunately it's the type of game that requires massive upfront costs before you can really gauge player interest and by the time they got that feedback (and it was negative) it was already too late so they cut their losses rather than absorb the further maintenance costs. It made total sense for Sega to add a high profile shooter to their portfolio, they trusted a studio with a proven track record, and they attempted to circumvent the competition (it was to be a full priced game, it wasn't a battle royale, and it had a huge budget).

But tell me if you've heard this before: a studio with a proven track record working well outside its wheelhouse, a massive budget in a genre dominated by heavy hitters with established IPs, a long development process in a shifting market with fickle tastes, and a tepid response when it needed to be a smash hit. What didn't make sense at all was for Sega to greenlight more Shenmue to maybe break even. I mean, what's the plan there?


This is probably true and, if we're rolling the dice with a new creative team for the anime, then it's probably the least bad option.

My issue with it is that this sort of shooter style game has been saturated for years now. So while I can understand them chasing the $$$$ this was done probably 5-7 years too late by the time development even kicked off. Destiny released in 2014 and would have had a dev cycle much before it. Destiny 2 came out in 2017. Alot of popular MMO titles started kicking off in 2010 with shooters coming into play 2012 onwards before battle royale games etc came into the market around 2015. This market was filling well before then and is now more than saturated. For every Live Service title that does well there are loads that end up scrapped and people let go. I get why it got canned if the feedback wasn't good the maintainence costs add to it but the whole idea was doomed from the start for me.

It's high risk and high-reward and another example of SEGA chancing its arm and getting it wrong. Sakura Wars mobile $20m pissed away after a matter of months on release.

They have plenty of older IP they could have used that money to invest in and turned profit on. Instead they chased something far too late and buggered it. Adding a shooter is one thing and I agree they could do with one. But chasing the online loot train is another.

 

[Seaman]

They have plenty of older IP they could have used that money to invest in and turned profit on. Instead they chased something far too late and buggered it. Adding a shooter is one thing and I agree they could do with one. But chasing the online loot train is another.

That's what can't fit in my mind. Bringing back older IP into the shooter project would had gotten probably more chance of attention catching than starting a new IP from scratch (which personally looked like the kind of game I wouldn't buy). Instead of codenaming it Hyenas and going with secrecy, a "Outrigger" or even "Virtua Cop" adapted to that kind of gameplay and publicy marketing. The mystique does the rest. Same way than Air Twister based part of its marketing in Space Harrier or Panzer Dragoon, it surely helped. Is ironic how some small studio like YS.net is aware of classics appealing and makes use of It while a giant like Sega seems almost embarrased of their own legacy and let it sit to dust. At one point, I will support them being bought by Disney or Microsoft.

Besides, I need to add: ROI Campbell. Sorry but is fun in my mind.

 

[iknifaugood]

Why would you cancel it right before it was ready to launch?

Because the cost of running the servers and continuing development support against their earning projections were less than the value of the tax write off. The game was also announced to low fanfare so it's been an uphill battle for them to turn it around which, combined with negative feedback from the beta, means that the game was not going to review well or get positive word of mouth which means that sales would likely not have legs.

Sega owe it to the fans to see one of their own IPs out.

It's actually Suzuki who owes us this, particularly after the Kickstarter. It's his life's work after all.

If they have enough money to throw at cancelled projects as big as HYENAS, they have enough money to give Shenmue the ending it deserves and at a fraction of those cost.

This would be true if fans would accept the kind of budget that Shenmue should be made for, which I doubt.

Adding a shooter is one thing and I agree they could do with one. But chasing the online loot train is another.

I'm not defending Hyenas, it looks as generic and designed-by-committee as they come, but without knowing the ins and outs of development, I have no idea if it got that way because of publisher meddling, incompetent design, not enough time, or just plain bad luck. Sometimes things just don't come together despite the best of intentions, you know? What I do know is that publishers are not idea people; they wanted a shooter to compete in that market and they had $100M to do it. You think Apex Legends started life a different way? These games aren't visionary auteur pieces.

 

[thedemon1238]

Because the cost of running the servers and continuing development support against their earning projections were less than the value of the tax write off. The game was also announced to low fanfare so it's been an uphill battle for them to turn it around which, combined with negative feedback from the beta, means that the game was not going to review well or get positive word of mouth which means that sales would likely not have legs.

Maybe you're right about a lot of things, but I'm not entirely convinced that people who consider "fog gaming" a revolution, can make an accurate judgment about whether a game will fail or not.


Is it really that expensive to release it free2play for one/two years? Even Babylon Falls was allowed to work for an year. Now that I know I won't be able to play Hyena, I'm starting to want at least to try it. Imagine if they do an event with Shenmue where you win Ryo's jacket (ingame item) or something. :)

If it's that easy to throw away a nearly finished game, the gaming industry is a scary place. But how are they so sure the game won't make money if they don't try? Silly and overrated games have become so popular that you never know what will click with people. :) Some beta testers have the power to decide the fate of a 100 million dollar project and the work of dozens of developers. Really?

 

[iknifaugood]

Is it really that expensive to release it free2play for one/two years?

From what I understand the game was intended to be sold as a full paid release so they likely either didn't have enough of an in game economy set up to sustain a free to play model or they had really bad metrics (low wishlists, low engagement on socials, and the aforementioned negative buzz) that it wouldn't have been worth it. They have to cover server costs, maintenance, bug fixes, balance patches, content updates, as well as all the marketing post-launch and it also means developers not working on other projects, so they actually stood to lose quite a bit more money if they went through with the launch.

If it's that easy to throw away a nearly finished game, the gaming industry is a scary place.

The film industry sends its regards.

But how are they so sure the game won't make money if they don't try? Silly and overrated games have become so popular that you never know what will click with people. :) Some beta testers have the power to decide the fate of a 100 million dollar project and the work of dozens of developers. Really?

To publishers, games are ultimately just a number, usually one of many. I'm sure there are many higher ups who will be on the chopping block for this fiasco and I don't want to downplay spending $100M on a game that never sees the light of day but whoever made the call looked at the numbers and determined that this was the least bad option (though it was certainly someone high up at Sega, not beta testers). Also worth pointing out that they have every incentive to inflate the cost for tax purposes but no doubt that it was substantial; certainly over $50M.

 

[Suzaku]

Without knowing the exact amount of money that Shenmue 3 made or sales figures, we have no way of knowing for sure how modest the success was. We know that, after 4 years, Shenmue 4 is nowhere to be found and Suzuki's next game was a mobile arcade game. That tells you everything you need to know.

YsNet is a company, so they have to do other jobs while they wait for the perfect occasion to develop shenmue 4, that's why they released mobile games and now Air Twister.

Shenmue 3 cost around $20M after all was said and done and ~$7M of that was from KS (with some fans paying several thousands of dollars extra); take that away and what does Shenmue's "profit" look like?

​

I see thedemon1238 already answered this.
Also like I said previously, Deep silver confirmed that it sold "fine", it means that the game made a profit.

You're suggesting that Yakuza games are made for half the budget that it took to make Shenmue 3?

Yeah, Shenmue 3 had twice the budget of an average Yakuza game.
It's not even a surprise, it's a more complex game technical-wise.

It's still a massive market. Rainbow 6, Overwatch, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, Destiny, Valorant, Fortnite etc. are all viable money printers for YEARS off the initial investment. To say nothing of smaller games like PUBG, Warframe, Escape from Tarkov, and even Battlebit Remastered just came out and did amazing numbers. And FPS games have been the biggest market for decades at this point so it's hard to say how "saturated" it is.

You already mentioned 11 games, It's oversaturated, especially if you (Hyenas) don't have any good idea and you're trying only to imitate what other games already did.
Also fps is still big yeah, but the golden age passed, now it's the golden age of the open world games, if anything it's crazy that Sega isn't investing more heavily on the genre.
Luckly they finally got Sonic open world, and in fact it become one of the best sellers in the entire franchise.

Nintendo never made a shooter before Splatoon and it sold very well. Same with Blizzard and Overwatch.

Nintendo has its own hardware that is a terrific advantage to sell your own games no matter the genre, while blizzard have a decade of experience for online games and services.

Nintendo are the only ones and they can only afford to do that because of their extensive library of games/exclusives. You think a lot of people are going to buy a console just for Sonic? Also, you want to talk about upfront costs? $100M is nothing compared to what it would take to develop and release a brand new console.

But the entire "super games" project was (still is?) about $600 million, that's what they are ready to spend.

 

[ahmed_alency7]

Do y’all think shenmue 4 is in development?

 

[Valascaziel]

Do y’all think shenmue 4 is in development?

You've already asked this?

 

[hyo_razuki]

Do y’all think shenmue 4 is in development?

Please stop.

 

[ahmed_alency7]

You've already asked this?

I just wanna hear more opinions what’s your thoughts since you comment on shenmue a lot