I"m guessing you missed the part where someone said that they're putting out 4 games simultaneously. It sounds like there's more than one person involved- if that's the case, how many ways is that $1,000 split? Who gets more? Who get less? Do they invest it back into the business for faster PC's, GPU's, asset packs, and other game related equipment? They probably all have real jobs and do this on the side, if that's all they're getting. It may seem like a small amount of content, but among their 4 titles- the updates have been somewhat consistent. There are some Devs making well above that and more- and you see people asking in their threads if the the game has been abandoned yet because there hasn't been an update in X number of months...
Even before I found out about them doing other games- I still thought the updates for this game were coming pretty regularly.
I'm in the Northeast U.S. and no, a grand isn't enough to cover all of the monthly bills and expenses.