Despite Shenmue's critical acclaim, it's not certain that the market exists. For comparison , Yakuza 1 and 2 (Yakuza is basically a spiritual successor to Shenmue in many ways) only sold 30k and 50k in the US market.
That means once the game is released, has an actual marketing/advertising budget, and word of mouth spreads, it's probably going to sell significantly more than that. They are also certainly going to port Shenmue 1 and 2, (since a lot of people will want to play the originals) so those should also sell reasonably well.
I'd rather see a shift toward creators getting paid for the work they do, which they put in one way or another, and away from absolute dependence on the market for post-hoc validation. Not a 100% shift ("real artists ship"), but toward an economic model that doesn't leave creators so beholden to such narrow sources of capital as a single publisher.