Shenmue 3 is scheduled to release in December 2017 but the pre-orders are already happening. You can pre-order Shenmue 3 for the PC on December 15.
Shenmue 3 PC pre-orders happening soon
Through the pages of the latest issue of Famitsu, Yu Suzuki has announced that on December 15 YS Net opens pre-order for the PC version of Shenmue 3, following the numerous requests received by the community.
The story of Shenmue 3 is comprised of 11 chapters. The first game was considered chapter 1. Then a manga was written to cover chapter 2. And the second game filled chapters 3, 4 and 5. This means Shenmue 3 will go from chapter 6. But it’s still unknown where it’ll end and even how many more games creator Yu Suzuki will be able to develop.
Most of the game’s funding has come from the crowdfunding website, Kickstarter. Initially asking for 2 million USD, the campaign quickly soared past this number. It took under 8 hours to reach this goal and went on to be funded for a total of over 6 million USD by nearly 70,000 backers. While there are other companies besides Sony funding Shenmue 3 and probably for a lot more than 6 million USD, it’s quite impressive that so many fans would come together and in such a short time raise a substantial amount of money like this.
There was some initial controversy surrounding backer rewards, particularly around the Slacker Backer campaign that was intended for people who were too late to fund the initial Kickstarter. While the developers Ys Net offer some cool rewards, apparently none of these would be available to anyone who backed the campaign via PayPal.