[QUOTE="Senor_Kami"]Internet megaton that will result in maybe 100,000 real world people being excited. Every Shenmue game has been a flop guys. It's nice that the PS4 is getting games but it getting Shenmue is hardly a megaton. Now, if it was Shenmue developed by Rockstar with Yu Suzuki being a consultant or something, that might be megaton but as it is now, this will just come out and tank like all the other Shenmue games.JamDev
You are definitely under-estimating the impact Shenmue made. It's features on a number of 'greatest games of all time' lists, and is very highly thought of by most of the people that played it. It's no coincidence that rumours about Shenmue 3 still cause a stir over a decade after the last entry in the series. They were revolutionary games when they came out, so much of what Shenmue did had never been attempted before. Not all of it was successful, and some of the things it introduced such as QTE's we could probably have done without, but there is no question they had a huge effect on game development.
The sales don't tell the full story, Shenmue sold as well as could be expected given the size of it's market, it was one of the highest selling games on the Dreamcast. There were never enough Dreamcasts sold for the game to sell in huge numbers, but it still sold about 1.5m copies to a very limited market. You also have to account for the massive piracy that went on with the DC, they had no protection against piracy and anyone with a CD burner had access to the full library. Shenmue 2 bombed in the US because everyone that wanted to play it had already imported or pirated the game, a lot more people have played the games than the official sales figures would suggest.
The losses Sega suffered from Shenmue were not down to weak sales so much as the huge amount of development that went into it. They invested heavily in a custom built engine for the Saturn version that never materialized, then a whole new engine for the DC games. The investment was in the software they hoped would power future games, they were never likely to see a return on the Shenmue games alone. At the time it was rumoured that Sega needed to sell 2 copies of Shenmue for every DC sold just to break even.
Realistically there will never be a Shenmue III, but the fact that people still get excited by the prospect should tell you everything you need to know about the impact it the original games made.
shenmue is one of the 5 best games ever made in my opinion and in a lot of peoples top 10. im still waiting for the hd release
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