I liked the original, so I'm going to back Psychonauts 2 enough to get a copy of the game, and maybe downloads of the documentary. I'm lukewarm on Broken Age, but I'm glad I backed it just for the making-of doc, which was really goddamn good.
If you look at their little returns calculator for potential investors, I think the default average wholesale revenue is way too high, especially when presented in comparison with the sales numbers for the original Psychonauts. I know from observing Humble Bundles and Steam Sales for the past several years that a large number of those latter-day Psychonauts sales were dirt-cheap, less than a dollar per unit. The default average wholesale in their calculator is $21 per unit, which strikes me as maybe possible for the console versions of the game, and the very initial Steam/Humble/GOG release, but after that…
The Figstarter provides a breakdown of sales for the original Psychonauts. About 475,000 of those sales were 2010 and earlier, when the original publisher had the rights and (I think?) there was a lot less discounting going on. Seems to me that era might be appropriate benchmark for the $21 wholesale number. The subsequent 1.2 million sales since Doublefine acquired the rights to the game have largely been extremely discounted, to the extent that it would be probably be more accurate to account for a lot of them as fractional sales.
The breakeven for investors at $21 per unit wholesale is 692,000 copies. I'm curious how many copies the original Psychonauts sold at that high of a wholesale, because it kinda sounds like they're saying they expect the sequel to do better.
If Psychonauts 2 sells the same number of copies as the original, 1.697 million, the breakeven for investors is an average of about $8.57 per unit wholesale. Is that overly optimistic? Maybe they should tell potential investors the average wholesale cost for all of those copies of the original, ever since it has been out for sale. I know that I, and a lot of people, picked up copies of that game for quite a bit less than $8.50.