Two brothers who run a school in China have chosen to pledge $20,000 towards the Shenmue 3 Kickstarter campaign in order to help spread awareness of underprivileged schools in China. These two brothers run a program aimed to teach English to young adults and children, with many students coming from small villages and may not be able to get to better schools.
Everything was detailed in a Shenmue Dojo forum post, where they explained why they chose to spend $20K backing a Kickstarter, rather than spending it on their own school: “We could have given $20,000 directly to building the school and it's programs but we feel that this pledge will lead to more exposure and support than what we could do through other mediums”.
The $20,000 pledge means that the brothers will have dinner with Yu Suzuki twice, during which they want to ask to have someone be placed in the game as a non-hostile NPC: “We don't want to be a character attacking Ryo. They deserve to be recognised for their hard work. They are volunteers and many of them come from poor rice farms. We are also hoping that since we will be listed in the credits as a special sponsor that it can have our school with a logo and a website rather than our names”
In all, the brothers want to raise awareness of their school and hopefully end up bringing in extra funding to provide a better education. As for Shenmue 3, the campaign currently sits at just under $4.4 million with ten days left to go, making it unlikely that it will hit the $10 million Yu Suzuki had really hoped for.
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KitGuru Says: Pledging $20K towards a game rather than your school is an odd business decision but if it ends up helping then fair enough, it still seems like a bit of a gamble though. Hopefully it all works out, it's a good cause after all.
Via: Eurogamer
Perhaps the brothers saw that it was having trouble getting to its target goal and thought it’d be a good gamble in raising awareness, after all do you not get your money back if the goal is not met ? if so they have their publicity and their money !
The $10mil is a stretch goal, since the funding has already surpassed $2mil the developers of Shenmue will receive the money regardless. It’s not quite what you said but they are indeed gambling on the awareness, they give away $20k and hopefully from the media coverage they will receive that money back and more in donations to their charity
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