Some 'Shenmue III' backers won't get their rewards after all

After breaking records with their Shenmue 3 Kickstarter campaign, the developers at Ys Net are taking an... interesting stance toward fans of the project. You see, as a result of the wildly successful crowdfunding campaign for another entry in the cult classic franchise, not everyone who wanted to get in on the action was able to before it ended. So Ys opened up a "slacker backer" period where folks could pledge their support (and dollars) via Paypal, adding to the $6 million already promised to the developers from Kickstarter backers. All good, right?

Well so as to not anger the folks who got in before the original campaign deadline, the developer conducted a poll to see if the "slackers" should have access to the previously promised rewards. The results are in.

Despite a majority of respondents saying they wanted the Kickstarter exclusive rewards (4,670 responded in the affirmative, 6,432 could take it or leave it and 4,009 said to keep the rewards exclusive), the developer has gone with the smallest vote here. Sure, that makes sense. Ys' official reasoning:

On one hand, here's to a video game company actually maintaining the integrity of the word "exclusive" for once. But on the other, the PayPal backers were initially promised access to this stuff. It's pretty excremental of Ys to deny them that even after poll results indicated that backers largely would be fine with offering the rewards to folks who were late to the party, though. But hey, worse things have happened to people who've backed a game on Kickstarter before.

*A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Ys Net would not ship PlayStation 4 physical copies for PayPal backers. It has since been updated to address that.