I've covered it in the topic a few times, but it's multiple factors;
- The Patreon dropping every month = less money to keep ourselves afloat while still paying for voicework, sound effects, and music monthly
- The bulk of voicework is being commissioned in the last 6 or so months of development, to the tune of $30,000+ (this isn't counting the roughly $40,000 we've paid our lead voice actress over the years), so we had to take out a loan for that
- When I cancelled Reclaim Reality back in 2018 or so, I'd already paid around $20,000 for assets up front out of pocket to get the demo going; on top of that, I paid about $5,000 in refunds to backers.
Prior to Summer 2021, I was able to pay off my $25k or so debt bit by bit each month, so I had it down to about $10k, but then the $30k loan came in, and yeah, i'm back up to $40k or so in debt.
To be clear on how much each thing costs, btw;
- Music = $100 per minute of music: there's currently over 3 hours (180 minutes) of music in the game, so $18,000 (and that's not counting mastering fees and that we give our musician 50% of the soundtrack tier monthly too)
- Voicework = $2-4 per sentence roughly, and at 250,000 words roughly (or 20 hours of voicework), you can see how this would add up to around $70k total
- Sound Effects = $3-15 per sound effect, and with the game having around 1,000 sound effects as of now, we've roughly paid probably around $8,000 or so, I'd estimate.
We've also of course got to pay rent, utilities, bills, food, gas, etc. as the Patreon income is the 99.5% of our income that the three of us on the core team get (we get a few hundred bucks from Itch.io every few months or so with bundles we run) and we split all the money we make, equally, three ways.
