Our rundown of what to expect from this year’s edition of The Game Awards includes a brief note about a supposed leak of a trailer for Shenmue 4, shared by a YouTube account with eight (now 12) subscribers. Is it really a leak, or just an elaborate fake? It’s looking like the latter, as Ys Net has posted a message on X saying the video “has absolutely no connection” to the studio.
The “work in progress” video purports to be a recording of a display screen, rather than a direct capture, so the quality isn’t great and, more importantly, it’s trickier to suss out whether it’s AI generated. But it has long-suffering Shenmue fans hopeful: It’s been six years since Shenmue 3 dropped (which happened a full 18 years after Shenmue 2), and while Shenmue creator Yu Suzuki has previously expressed a desire to make a new game in the series, there’s been no movement toward that actually happening.
Oddly enough, while Ys Net is threatening legal action, at the time that I write this the video remains on YouTube.
It behooves me to point out that nowhere in this message is there an explicit denial that Shenmue 4 is in the works, or that a trailer is going to turn up at The Game Awards: It’s simply a denial that the video is official. It is possible that there’s something real behind it and “unofficial” only refers to how it was released, though it feels like a slim one.
For the record, I think it’s fake, pure and simple, but the cynical and paranoid part of my brain never takes these things for granted. If you too are resolutely holding onto Shenmue 4 hope (or a deeply rooted mistrust of the world around you, as the case may be) the good news is that undeniable clarity will arrive soon. The Game Awards 2025, in which the Shenmue 4 trailer either will or won’t be shown (and it won’t be, unless it is), is now just three days away: It happens on December 11, with a pre-show kickoff at 4:30 pm PT/7:30 pm ET.
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