I'm not saying that the EU or US market easily outsold the original japanese S1 or S2 release,
thats why i said nowadays,
So you’re saying that S3 sold better outside of Japan than it did in? Surely if that were the case then Japanese sales would have accounted for less than 1.6% of the total, right? That would mean that the game sold more than 1,125,000 copies worldwide in its first week. Amazing that It did so well without breaking into the top ten charts in any major market other than Japan!
there is clearly a reason why pretty much all of the recent Shenmue content came from outside of Japan.
Indeed there is. Sony (who, afaiaa, didn’t actually spend a penny on the project) got fed up of being hounded by Shenmue fans on Twitter every month and saw an opportunity to earn some free goodwill with the gaming community while Embracer/DS saw the success of the Kickstarter and thought they could make some easy money.
Things that are released by US or EU companies
are mostly made for people within these regions.
No they’re not. That’s why developers/publishers go to the effort of localizing their games for people all over the world. That’s also why DS signed off on the ridiculously convoluted gambling system that was seemingly designed solely to appease Chinese censors despite it making the game objectively worse for western audiences.[/quote]
Yet all of the latest Shenmue projects and effort came from outside of Japan.
Quite the opposite, actually. The bulk of Shenmue 3’s development was done by YS Net in Japan (with the rest taking place in India, I believe) and the anime was also produced here by a Japanese studio.
So if the japanese Shenmue audience
is bigger than any other region, by population or willingly buying more copies,
why did nothing happen with the series at all for years and years and years
until all of these companies from the west came on board?
Things only started happening because Yu decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign due to the support of the fan base and the success of the Mighty No. 9 campaign. Sony helped to promote the it, but the Kickstarter would have still happened even if Sony hadn’t provided a stage on which to announce it (though I doubt it would have been anywhere near as successful). By the time Deep Silver got involved Shenmue 3 was already funded and so I don’t think it could ever be argued that “nothing” had happened before they came on board.
It’s starting to sound as though your entire argument is that the combined population of North America and Europe is larger than the population of Japan, in which case, no shit, Sherlock. Using that logic, you could argue that just about any Japanese series is more popular in the West than it is in Japan, or even that bratwurst and sauerkraut are less popular in Austria and Germany than they are in the rest of the world.
The fact remains though, that when looking at total sales as a percentage of the total population, the data that we have suggests that Shenmue is significantly more popular in Japan than it is in North America or Europe. Pointing out that Japanese people don’t comment that much on English language websites (who would’ve thought?) isn’t going to change that.