Quote Originally Posted by Gentlegamer View Post
Why was a kickstarter at Sony's show? That makes no sense. If it's a worthy game, Sony can fund it fully.
Because in the future in which we live, "classic gaming" business models are dead in favor of unfinished, 1000 patches pending, DLC-laden, IAP-addled business models which aim to basically charge double for a game by charging once for the bulk and once again when you add up the costs of all of the DLC for a product which, when released to the world in a so-called "gold master" state, is in fact in what used to be considered an early internal beta state.

So when you want to release a game in the mold of a "classic gaming" business model, SONY takes one look at the super successful Kickstarter projects, licks its lips, and thinks to itself, "Why pay for development when the crazy fanatics will? Let's skip manufacturing and distributing physical copies which imbue people with first sale rights, go digital only to drive our distribution costs down to near-zero, and skip development costs by externalizing that factor to the most die-hard fans out there. Then we can just toss out an advertising campaign for the thing, have that as our only business cost, and reap all of the profits we can!" The company then turns to the hopeful game developer and offers a cash incentive to him if he can raise enough capital through a crowd-funding campaign in exchange for a time-limited window of console exclusivity.

But in lighter news, the $2M goal was reached by 5 A.M. Mountain Time this morning! It is sitting at $2,089,084 total as of this writing.

By the way, that means that Shenmue III set the world record for the fastest time a gaming-based Kickstarter project reached $1,000,000 in crowd-funding.

And for anyone saying that $2M for this game's development is too expensive, or that $10M for the "full Shenmue III experience" is too expensive, keep in mind that Shenmue I cost $47 million to make. Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3..._Shenmue_3.php

I think it is really cool that one of the $10,000 rewards for this project was the original, real-world Ryo Hazuki brown leather jacket worn by his Japanese voice actor to promotional events. That one got snatched up quickly.

By the way, sfchakan, what was that about a snow ball?