Sony sends Social Media into a frenzy by crowdfunding Shenmue 3
June 25 2015Last Tuesday was the 2015 edition of E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo. With all of the top video game companies announcing their hot new releases, E3 has always been an unmissable annual event for gamers. But even if video games aren’t your cup of tea, there’s a good chance that E3 2015 turned up in your Twitter stream last week.
Why? Sony hit the headlines with the announcement that it would be bringing back the legendary video game Shenmue… if fans were prepared to contribute via the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.
The multi-million dollar company launched the crowdfunding campaign at its E3 press conference, with the promise that Shenmue III would be made if 2 million dollars were raised. The goal was reached within hours, breaking two Kickstarter records in the process, a wildly successful campaign that attracted international attention.
Using the Visibrain platform, we can sort through the 257,830 tweets that were posted between June 15th and June 19th to find out what Twitter thought of the return of Shenmue.
Shenmue’s creators put the fate of the game into the hands of fans
Fans had almost given up on the creation of Shenmue III, and no wonder. Shenmue I and II were created fourteen years ago, but complications within the industry meant that the sequel had never come to light. The games were extremely popular and fans had been asking for the next part of the story for so long that Shenmue III had achieved near-legendary status. So it’s no surprise that when game creator Yu Suzuki revealed that it could finally be on the verge of being made, the fans went wild.
A certain amount of teasing had already taken place before the official announcement, so Shenmue-lovers were waiting with baited breath on the day of the conference to find out if the rumors were true.
The announcement was made at 6.51 pm. Fans sprang into action at the chance to make sure the game was made, and by 6.53 pm the news had already been tweeted 5,913 times.
The #SaveShenmue hashtag was used to get others involved and to encourage them to pledge. By the second day of E3, the hashtag had been used 6,433 times.
If we look at gender demographics, 81.9% of persons who tweeted about Shenmue III were men, which falls in with the idea that that video gaming is still a male-dominated industry.
Just 9 hours and 17 minutes later, Shenmue III reached its target of 2 million dollars. The project was literally funded overnight, breaking two Kickstarter records as the fastest video game to raise 1 million dollars, and the fastest video game to raise 2 million dollars. The following morning, the @Playstation Twitter account tweeted to confirm that the funding goal had been reached.
You did it! You funded Shenmue III *literally overnight* — congratulations, @yu_suzuki_jp! http://t.co/E1Gkzokivs pic.twitter.com/3rVktKopOo
— PlayStation (@PlayStation) June 16, 2015The message was retweeted 1,776 times between June 15th and June 19th, and was the third most retweeted post of the entire campaign.
A project that put Kickstarter in the spotlight
Sony and Shenmue weren’t the only ones getting a lot of publicity over the crowdfunding project. Kickstarter also got its fair share of attention. The huge interest in Shenmue III and the fact that it broke two records took the story beyond the scope of the video game world and into mainstream media.
If we use the Visibrain platform to study top domains that tweets about Shenmue III linked to, we can see that kickstarter.com was the most tweeted domain with 37,065 tweets. With a link to the kickstarter.com domain present in 23.5% of tweets, nearly one tweet in four linked to the Kickstarter campaign page.
Using the Visibrain platform’s Quick Trends feature, we can see just how much of an effect the Shenmue 3 campaign had on overall Twitter activity for Kickstarter. On the day the project was announced, the amount of tweets mentioning Kickstarter spiked from 18,759 to 99,454. That’s a lot of free publicity.
Let’s take a look at who was doing the tweeting. Using the Visibrain platform’s Focus feature, we can zoom in on tweets containing the word “kickstarter”. If we then look at tweets with the highest number of impressions, the platform shows that the top 8 high-impression tweets came from influential media accounts with no direct link to the video game industry.
So Shenmue III wasn’t a story that only appealed to gamers. Accounts such as the Wall Street Journal may have introduced many people not only to Shenmue, but to Kickstarter itself and the power of crowdfunding as a concept. The fact that such a large amount of money was raised entirely by fans in such a short time, and for a video game no less, was a subject of great interest to many.
A controversial crowdfunding
In spite of the excited reactions from fans and the speedy crowdfunding, the Shenmue III Kickstarter project also provoked some negative reactions that could have grown into a full-blown brand crisis for Sony.
Hi, we're Sony, a multi-billion dollar mega corporate entity.
Please support our new Kickstarter!
— Brian Altano (@agentbizzle) June 16, 2015This tongue-in-cheek post was retweeted 578 times, showing that not all fans agreed with the idea. Many users voiced their doubts about why a multi-million dollar company such as Sony would need to resort to crowdfunding at all. It’s easy to understand why the campaign raised questions. Shenmue 1 and 2 are said to have been among the most expensive games of all time to produce, costing around $47M, and that was 14 years ago. The Kickstarter goal was just $2 million. Sony and Shenmue’s creators offered little to no explanation as to why the game was being funded in such a way.
We can find out how many tweets questioned Sony’s announcement by filtering on keywords. If we use the Visibrain platform to filter tweets containing “question” keywords such as “why”, “explain”, or “reason”, we can see that there were 2,707 tweets containing these expressions between June 15th and June 19th. Compared to the overall number of tweets, this is barely even 1%.
By inspecting the links contained in tweets using these same expressions, we can see that the most retweeted link leads to an article about the mystery of the Shenmue III budget.
Such a small number of negative tweets can hardly be called a major crisis, but the campaign’s lack of transparency could have caused much more serious problems if more fans had jumped on the bandwagon. Sony and Shenmue’s creators got off lucky this time.
Could it all just have been an elaborate publicity stunt? If so, it certainly worked. If we look at top expressions used in tweets posted on the first day of the campaign, we can see that the announcement of the Kickstarter project attracted a lot of attention to Sony’s other new releases, such as Final Fantasy 7 and The Last Guardian. Variations of these expressions stand out in the word cloud of most frequently used expressions.
The transparency issues and negative comments haven’t put people off, as the Kickstarter is now well on its way to the 4 million dollar mark. However, with Yu Suzuki now stating that 10 million dollars will be needed for Shenmue III to achieve its full potential, its advocates may perhaps need to be a little more open about where the money is going to convince fans to part with their hard-earned cash.
The initial excitement has now died down, as has the number of tweets. Shenmue III may well be back in the press and our Twitter feeds by next month however, as its creators are planning to take Twitter by storm on July 3rd with an auto-tweet campaign promoting the Kickstarter.
On July 3rd ask every gamer you know to help Yu Suzuki get Shenmue 3 funded. $30 on the 3rd! #SaveShenmue pic.twitter.com/4ZgtkLcpcq
— Shenmue Dojo (@Shenmue_Dojo) June 20, 2015Will Shenmue III break yet another crowdfunding record? Keep an eye on your Twitter feeds next month to find out.
Subscribe to the newsletter
Stay up to date and subscribe to our newsletter and receive media monitoring best practices, social data trends & exclusive case studies: