In a Reddit interview, Persson recalled, ”I somewhat naively thought ‘a couple of million’ was two million. I had no doubt in my mind that a Psychonauts 2 would earn that money back easily. Turns out they wanted 18 million dollars, haha. I don’t have the time at the moment to even try to get educated enough to make an 18 million dollar deal. Perhaps in some distant future when I’m no longer trying to make games, I could get into angel investing. I’ve made one private investment into a game so far, at $100K, and it’s frankly a lot more work than I thought.”
One wonders why Double Fine and Persson wouldn’t launch a Kickstarter campaign to defray some of the costs of the game, filling in the rest. Double Fine Adventure alone raised $3.3M as an unknown IP.
