Alright, yet you still didnt answer why Sega or any other japanese company never tried to go for the Japan only path,
like many other niche game series over there do.
Because it has no relevance whatsoever to the topic being discussed. Shenmue was never intended to be a niche series, so why on earth would Sega (or anybody else, for that matter) intentionally alienate 98.6% of the world’s population by only releasing it in Japan?
If the japanese audience is so much bigger and the IP so much more popular over there, why did it even need all of these steps with the huge pause between S2 and 3.
Why did Yu Suzuki even had to ask for international support if Japan carries the IP single handedly?
Again, nowhere have I said that Japan single-handedly carries the IP. The data we have suggests that between 25% and 33% of all Shenmue sales have been in Japan. That might make it the most popular single region, but 67% to 75% of sales still take place elsewhere.
Sega clearly had no problem with giving away the IP to someone else as long as Sega keeps all of the IP rights,
yet the best offer didnt come from any of the dozens of japanese publishers,
you know, the country where the devs are from,
no the best offer came from a AA publisher from Austria Germany.
Sega didn’t give away the IP. They licensed it out to Yu, who then signed a publishing deal with Deep Silver a few years later. As for why it was Deep Silver who made the best offer, we can only speculate, but I expect that it’s a combination of two things.
First and foremost, it appears that, like you, Deep Silver made the mistake of massively over-estimating the popularity of Shenmue outside of Japan. Granted, it didn’t sell amazingly well here either, but had it performed similarly elsewhere (ie, been the best-selling PS4 game in its opening week) it would have sold over a million copies worldwide, which, based on Embracer’s comments and its failure to chart in any major territory outside of Japan, it seems safe to say that it didn’t.
You can literally scroll through the original Kickstarter comments
and there are 3 japanese comments within a pool of 1000 comments.
Here are some links to reuploads of some of the reactions to Shenmue 3’s announcement on NicoNico (
1,
2,
3,
4,
5). Between them they have more than 7,000 comments, all of which are in Japanese. Does that mean that no Western Shenmue fans didn’t comment on or care about Shenmue 3’s announcement? Of course not.
I really shouldn’t have to explain why Japanese people might prefer to use a Japanese site to talk about Shenmue than a western one (or vice versa), nor that comments on a Kickstarter page or NicoNico video have nothing to do with sales. Also, you do realize that some Japanese people can speak English, right?
Also i didnt say that the Shenmue content didnt came from Japan
You absolutely did. Check your original post.
All of the updated Shenmue merchandise came from western companies.
No.
It.
Didn’t.
Your own argument about Japan vs EU & US does make as much sense as mine.
Ok, then lets compare the single countries like Austria with 9 mil people or Denmark with 6 mil
against Japan with 126 mil. Not a single country in EU comes close to the population in Japan.
So i guess true japanese games can never be a success or popular in these single countries then
because its impossible to reach that same ratio.
Yeah, thats way more fair than EU / US vs Japan.
You’ve lost me a little here. My argument is (and has always been) that between 25% and 33% of all Shenmue sales have been in Japan and that the proportion of the population purchasing the games in Japan is higher than it is in Europe or North America. There is plenty of data floating around to back this up, some of which was posted a little earlier on in this thread.
For example, estimates suggest that the Shenmue HD remasters sold around 10,000 copies in their first week in the UK (around one sale for every 6,722 people), compared to 37,500 week 1 sales in Japan (around one sale for every 3,355 people). Estimates suggest that Shenmue 3 sold around 5,000 units in its first week on sale in the UK (around one sale for every 13,444 people), while we know that it sold 17,857 physical copies during its opening week in Japan (around one sale for every 7,045 people). In both cases, we can see that Shenmue is almost twice as popular in Japan when viewed as a proportion of the total population.
I guess Shenmue really is something magical. A IP / series that is literally being almost completely funded internationally
for 5, 6, 7 years now, yet the big main audience is all japanese. Sounds plausible.
For the umptienth time, nowhere have I said that the main audience for Shenmue is in Japan. Shenmue is more popular here than it is in the rest of the world, but due to Japan only making up 1.6% of the world’s population, between 67% and 75% of the total market for Shenmue is elsewhere.