Maybe you should post paradoxes revenue per retail outlet as well, so we can decide how best to support the developer of the products we buy rather than the retailers who try and shovel used crap at us.
A couple of years ago the rule of thumb was that a boxed copy brought in a developer+publisher about 30 dollars on a 50 dollar sale. But now with online distribution, especially through gamersgate, I'm going to guess the percent is higher. IIRC Vicky was published by Strategy first, whereas everything since then was self published? That would seem to indicate more revenue/copy. Can you get funding from national culture agencies? Maybe they don't exist in Sweden quite the same but in canada if you're making a product like Vicky you could probably be cashing in on some gov't support if you're making it reasonably historically accurate - or at least potentially historically accurate game.
What is your price point? What are you basing the price point on? What does your longer term price curve look like? What sort of Q&A, Q&C processes are you looking at? Sorry, but HOI3 is buggy, as in game killing bugs, which should not have left the door, there are design issues too (next paragraph), but the bugs, like slowdowns and so on don't inspire us to buy the next product. How much are you willing to invest in marketing? Vicky represents very interesting periods in 3 or 4 of the big game market countries. The US civil war, the french republic, empire, republic, WW1, and then German unification and WW1, and Britain's empire management, expansion, and devolution, and WW1. Not that there aren't other interesting countries, but specifically the big markets should get stuff targeted marketing wise at them. It's a tall order, but the game should do a good job of modelling the Westward expansion of the US, WW1, and everythign in between. By controlling the purse strings you can guarantee your hair stays unchanged, as can (what would be in hindsight) wrong managerial choices.
On design. I don't see your sales figures, and in a sense I only speak for myself, but the plethora of negative threads on the HOI3 forum warrant some aggregation. A lot of us, in many cases fans of several years, are not happy with the general direction taken with HOI3, and to a lesser extent, EU3. This *Might* be an implementation problem in some respects, but the lack of detailed historical events doesn't make a lot of us happy. I think there are very different directions that could have been taken that we would have liked. EU3 it was sort of understandable - the period at least needs the option to evolve in a Civilization sort of way, HOI3 is sufficiently short that the events, even simple ones like changes in leaders for government, make significant differences to the flavour and behaviour of the game, their absence shows either a lack of polish, or design we don't like. Vicky is the middle ground, it's kinda short compared to EU, and encapsulates a lot HOI length stuff in it (with long periods of relatively inactivity). That makes it a difficult undertaking, and as inspiring as it is to see the project live, it's hard to jump out and say "I'LL BUY THIS GAME ABSOLUTELY NO MATTER WHAT". Well ok, I probably will, but I'm on the academic side of strategy game development, and vicky was by far my favourite of the Paradox games. There are lots of things I would love to change in the nuts and bolts mechanics, but so much of it is wonderfully fun - and unlike a WW1 or WW2 game where different countries give you a different view of essentially the same events, different countries in Vicky give different takes on different events. Think about Bill Roper's Hellgate lifetime subscription thing (which he has repeated for Champions Online). Even you didn't buy the last one, you heard it didn't work out well, and EU3 to some degree and definitely HOI3 have left a bad taste in our collective mouths - what are you going to do with Vicky, because there's a limit to how much money I will give paradox when the new product is, by at least my own personal measure, inferior to the previous product (see Vista - which took 6 months post release to catch up to XP, and killed their sales and reputation). I want Vicky2 to be to HOI3 what Windows 7 is to vista: there's a good framework there, but a lot of polish is needed. (Note: Much of the actual combat mechanics of HOI3 would probably work well in Vicky, esspecially in the naval spehere).
The negative part said - I love the idea of a new vicky. I would love to help make it good if that's possible. They aren't giving me a PhD in game development for my good looks; AI, rendering, performance, networking, economic modelling, GPU computing (for said economic modelling), I can do. Want to set up a Canadian office so we can leech money from the Canadian heritage foundation (and be forced to include a series of historical events for the creation and continuation of Canada)? I can help. Q/A, testing, debugging whatever. We - the fans- want these games, HOI, EU, Vicky, Rome Crusader kings etc. to be the best games we can get, please don't hesitate to use us as a resource. HOI3 suffers a lot because they let the wrong people into testing, or not enough people, I wasn't in on the testing but I'm going to guess you want people who have the time, skills, and inclination to pick apart the nuts and bolts of things that don't work (like ever expanding save games), we're here, and reading AI game programming Wisdom 1-4 and GPU gems 1-3 is getting boring. Obviously you need the general 'consumer' too, but you need to control their experience - they won't tell you what they don't like, they'll use the beta as a demo on their own, and if they don't like it (which being a beta means they probably won't) they're likely to walk away unless you tie them to a chair and force them to talk about it.