The kickstarter may very well be Sony's attempt at gauging interest in the game before outright funding it.

It's easy for someone to answer a poll asking if they'd like a game. It's an entirely different story to put up your own hard-earned dollars to fund it's development.

Nobody said kickstarter is the only funding.

Sony is paying something for the exclusivity, I imagine. They might also be matching 2:1 or something. Who knows?

The kickstarter is only a day old, this amount of press will grow that $2M.

Plus they're using UE4, saving a lot vs the custom engine of Shenmue I.

We only have one piece of the financial puzzle, here.

This is from their kickstarter page:

"The real challenge now is to deliver a sequel that we will all be satisfied with after 14 years of waiting. After much research and planning, we set the funding goal at this level believing it will make possible a fulfilling Shenmue experience."

Bloodstained, a Castlevania-ish remake, notes that the Kickstarter money is to finish the funding while the remaining 90% came from external investors. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/iga/bloodstained-ritual...

It's a new game, not a remake.

From a simple technology point of view, game development for PC and PS4 using 2015 tools like the Unreal engine is a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than developing for the Dreamcast using 1999 era tools.

Team sizes have increased, development cycles have increased, the size and amount of content expected in games has increased. Just because you now have better tools, doesn't mean it's guaranteed to get any cheaper.

Things have changed drastically since then. Shenmue was the first virtual world of this size, nowadays you can leverage engines capable of that out of the box.