$30,000 a month multiplied by 12 is $360,000 and that's not even adding the Steam sales, yeah this game makes bank if things keep going the way they are. I don't know how much he distributes between his paid staff, but it's still pretty interesting to note that the games gonna make the team millionaires by the next presidential election.
The game has reached its 3 year anniversary and we've just finished act 1 last year. This game is gonna make a lot of money once it's finally done.
Hate to break it to you, but your number is waaaaaay off. Keep in mind TiTS gets about 32 - 33 thousand a month too for... drum roll... a flash game that hasn't even been converted to JavaScript yet.
Hypothetically lets say just on Patreon figures along in a US state with no income related taxes. At:
+ $756,000 gross (12851 patrons total between CoCII and TiTS as of May 25, 2021)
- 2.95% per transaction fee = 22302
- $0.35 per transaction fee = 4497.85
- 5% Patreon fee = 37800
- US Federal Tax on gross earnings = $242,741 (32.11% federal takes)
Net = $448,659.15 before any state related taxes
No clue how much he pays his writers, software engineers or artists, but he's either paying them on the cheap or is generous enough to allocate the Glassdoor average (or low average) of $48k salary per writer, $60 - 75k per JavaScript Dev, and their full time artist $50k - 80k annually which turns that Net value close to zero.
Anyone with more financial know how feel free to correct me. My main point is that either the costs of development use up the near half million net value between two games (I can honestly see that since he's hired full time devs and writers) or the patrons are getting nickel and dimed without knowing it.
No shade on the dev, more power them for having enough of a following to pull in such large figures, but considering how slow and mismanaged the development of the game is I completely agree the game is going to cost upwards of most AAA titles.