I had a similar idea except for financial crowdfunding it would be talent crowdfunding. We have so many talented programmers, artists, designers, musicians ect. in this community that if Yu ever obtained the license and wanted to pursue free help we could all help tremendously, even people without high skills could be useful for grunt work like filling in spreadsheets and such.
From experience I can say it is unrealistic. I am a movie director/technical engineer (depends on the project). I've worked on project with no budget before, where everyone works for free. Well I can tell you how horrible it is. At some point, many people start to be unprofessional, don't work on time, don't arrive on time on set, leave earlier, don't do their work in post-production etc... And I can't blame them, working for free while trying to get to a very professional result, it's hard, really hard and it is not necessarily rewarding. Also alot of people, when they accept to work for free, many times, another work comes up. One with a contract and a pay. So obviously, they'll take the one that'll pay them money, that'll pay their bills, food, entertainment and so on. Can't blame them, but it's something that makes working on project only with people working for free an f'in pain in the A.
And here we are talking about potentially hundreds of people to get the job done. Working on a video game, such as Shenmue, it means working on it full time. So either you have to say "F-U" to a money making job (good luck paying your bills), or spending an incredible amount of free time on it. And I mean, an excessive one, and not for a few weeks, but I mean for months or years.
I remember, I was working on music for a video game project for free. It was from an online community I spend alot of time on. I've worked for 6 months on it. I spent countless hours working on music. Spent alot of free time on it. People weren't satisfied with my work at all. And that's ok. The problem is that after 6 months and hundreds of hour of unpaid work that went all straight to the garbage can, as soon as somebody offered me a paid contract on another job, full time, for months, I can tell you I dropped everything at once and left the project.
It was 4 years ago, I still receive news from the project (I'm still in the group chat, if I ever want to go back into it one day), the proper dev hasn't really started yet, they changed the engine a year ago and restarted everything from scratch. And the full team, except for the director, has been completely changed and renewed, and there's been a lot of tensions inside the project. And it's a project that needs only a dozens of people.
So yeah, while I get where your idea is coming from, why you're proposing it, I think it creates too much of a headache sadly.
