‘The fate of Shenmue is in your hands now!’: Kickstarter, video games and the financialization of crowdfunding

In July 2015, a crowdfunding campaign launched to revive the notoriously unprofitable video game series Shenmue closed with the record figure of above US$6 million, to date the highest amount ever raised on Kickstarter for video game funding. This article takes this campaign as an endemic case study of the changing funding mechanisms concerning video game production in the digital ecosystem of Web 2.0. Although the campaign displays some of the participatory elements often attributed to crowdfunding and digital convergence, it also sheds doubts on accountability and the effective capacity of crowdfunding to substantially challenge and de-hierarchize power relations in the video game industry. In particular, the Shenmue III campaign illustrates how the crowdfunding initiative was instrumentally mobilized by its organizers to attract further corporate sponsorships and stakeholders outside crowdfunding. This controversial episode shows how commercial platforms like Kickstarter are increasingly facilitating a process of financialization of crowdfunding, whose main effect is not so much the equal coming together of media consumers and producers as the minimization of risks for large video game corporations. By mapping the history of the Shenmue franchise from its original failure in the era of physical distribution to its recent crowdfunded success, this article argues that the empowering potentials of crowdfunding cannot be readily assumed without a contingent analysis of the cultural and political economy underlying Web 2.0 and its digital platforms.