It’s hard to forget in the excitement of Shenmue 3’s impending release date next year, but the game was originally announced with crowdfunding campaign. In fact, the Shenmue 3 project began life as a record breaking Kickstarter. Through all this time, crowdfunding for the game has actually been kept open.
But today, developers Ys Net announced that as of the end of the crowdfunding campaign earlier this year, the game stood at a final funding tally of over $7 million. How much, exactly? $7,179,510, which came in from 81,087 fans.
$7 million isn’t actually a whole lot, and comes in at a fraction of the budget that went into the original two Shenmue games, widely credited to be among the most expensive games ever made. Still, from everything we have seen of the game so far, it looks like the final product will end up living up to the hype that fans have had for it for almost 15 years now.
Shenmue 3 launches on August 27 for PC and PS4.