Shenmue III is going to suck

Listen, I love Shenmue. I've completed the original Dreamcast game a half dozen times, and attempt to play through it every year at Christmas. But it seems like a lot of people have forgotten something about the game:

It's really not good.

The controls are even more obviously dreadful than when the game was released, sixteen years ago. The last decade and a half has been incredibly unkind to the visuals. The story is over-padded, dumb and poorly paced. The script and dialogue are laughably awful. The Virtua Fighter-based combo system has been surpassed by modern combat systems, leaving Shenmue's battles feeling sluggish and boring. The one thing it still does better than nearly any other game I've played, the minute details of the world that Ryo could explore, pick up and examine, was all but dropped by the first sequel, leaving little hope that a third installment will reduce its scope in exchange for focus.

The Kickstarter for a third installment has, at the time of writing, just passed its $2,000,000 funding goal - a thirty-fifth of the Dreamcast original's $70 million budget - with 31 days remaining.

If I'm honest, I never wanted Shenmue to continue. The second game's out-of-nowhere cliffhanger, with a levitating magic sword, was the final straw; the believable, realistic world of Sakuragaoka and Dobuita was what I loved about the game, and by introducing overt supernatural elements - seemingly out of nowhere - the game had lost me.

I'm surprised the Kickstarter has been this successful. As vocal as they were, and continue to be, Shenmue can't have enough fans to justify the kind of budget that's required to produce a game that'll satisfy them. This campaign is undoubtedly a kind of financial proof-of-concept for a larger investor - maybe Sony, since they hosted the announcement at their E3 press conference - to put up the rest of the budget.

But who's going to buy the game apart from the people already clamouring to support it? Who's going to be willing to jump straight into the third installment of a sixteen-year-old period kung fu series? Shenmue isn't going to appeal to the Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed crowd, which is where all the money seems to be, these days. How many people remember Shenmue as anything other than a forum joke?

Especially given the terrible pitch video on the campaign page. My brother sarcastically described it as "really pushing the upper limits of what the Dreamcast can do"; to me, it looks like a particularly impressive third-year computer arts student's showreel. I guess it looks like a $2 million game, but that's not what the series' fans want, and I'm sure it's not what Yu Suzuki wants either.

But even if I'm not going to play it, I do hope Suzuki gets to finish Shenmue. Closure's been a long time coming for its creator as well as its fans - let's just hope Shenmue III doesn't end on another 14-year cliffhanger.

Why I can't support Penny Arcade Sells Out

I think that generally, Kickstarter is a brilliant service that provides a much-needed funding source for projects that wouldn't have any startup finances at all. The problem is the recent spate of high-profile projects that have been breaking records, which have brought the Kicktsarter process to the attention of people who just want their ongoing costs to be covered rather than bringing something new to the table.

I think that's the main problem I have with Penny Arcade Sells Out. They're not starting anything with this project, and they're not going to do anything new with the money. They're just replacing a revenue stream, which seems to miss the point of Kickstarting something. The admission that they'll have to do this yearly just underlines how far away from the real point of Kickstarter this is.

And how much money will this take away from other Kickstarter projects? How many people will be spending $15 or $25 to Penny Arcade that they would have otherwise spent on projects that are actually creating something new? Gabe in particular has been emphasising on Twitter that nothing's actually going to change in terms of the content of Penny Arcade, so this is literally a $1 million ad blocker. You can get those for free, by the way.

There's been some implication that by replacing the ad revenue with crowdfunding, Penny Arcade will have more time for other projects, but I don't see how. I wouldn't have imagined that Gabe and Tycho are spending a lot of time moderating and approving advertising content; if they are, then what do they have business management people for?

I'd also like to know what their current advertising income is, and how it compares to the Kickstarter goal. Are they ripping people off, charging two or three or several times what they currently make on ads, or is $1m a bargain? Considering how many of the ads they run are seemingly for Penny Arcade's own side projects, what percentage of their advertising rotation is actually external business?

I don't remember the last time I took particular notice of an advert on any webpage, unless it started playing sound at me, or expanded to fill my screen when I rolled a mouse over it - which none of Penny Arcade's ads have ever done, to the best of my memory. They're mostly unintrusive and usually relevant to my (or at least PA's core audience's) interests. They only have two ad locations on the entire site, and one of those isn't even on the page with the comic strip.

If they wanted to do a Kickstarter for the Automata project, or the Lookouts project, or any of the other stretch goal bonus content, that'd be fine (although they'd probably need to do more than six pages each, and it would require a print run, if they wanted to justify the kind of money they'd undoubtedly ask for).

I can't help but see the Penny Arcade staff watching the total climbing and asking each other, "can you believe people are falling for this?"