Shenmue III is set in China.
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Shenmue III at $4.9M pledged as Kickstarter campaign nears close, 3rd highest ever for a game

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 2 min

Yu Suzuki’s new startup Ys Net has received $4.9 million in pledges on its Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to develop Shenmue III, the third-highest amount for any video game on the crowdfunding site.

Suzuki unveiled the campaign to bring back the epic role-playing series at Sony’s press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in mid-June. The news got a roar of applause, and the campaign raised $2 million in its first 10 hours. Even at $4.9 million, the Shenmue is just behind Ouya ($8.6 million) and another Japanese game, Castlevania creator Koji Igarashi’s Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night ($5.5 million) for the highest total in Kickstarter game history. Now the campaign has about 57 hours to go. To stoke demand, Suzuki released this video.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.