Although i think he might have OCD instead, he hyper focuses on the smallest stuff. Quality is his biggest passion from talking to him, if it's not up to his standards he will work it over and over until it is. Which is why it's not the biggest game, but it sure is a good looking one, not many like it visually.
Might explain a fuckton of bugfixes that should be ignored in 80% of the cases. Pareto principle is still true to this day - 80% of the work is responsible for 20% of the results, while 20% of the work is responsible for 80% of the results. Ero is obviously doing it the wrong way, focusing on small details that don't bring in any value whatsoever...
To you it may seem a lot but it's still not enough to hire the professional staff he desires. He's doing what he can with the people he knows.
Trust me, it is enough. Why you guys always try to calculate wages and costs as if everything is done in fucking NYC, Silicon Valley or goddamn Liechtenstein? I've just did my quick research. In more than HALF of the european countries, you can get more than a decent developer with experience in gamedev + an artist, both on full time payroll and you will still end up with fuckton of money to spare or hire TWO more people and pay them well. And that is if you want to keep it in the wider west...if you move to some asian/african/s.american countries, you can actually get a full bloody team for that money. Companies like Accenture have outsource centers in Argentina or Poland for a reason...and keep in mind that gamedev is a low-cost industry so salaries are often way below the required skills for similar positions in typical business enviroment (like the ERP systems or business applications). That's exactly the same reason why there's a huge boom of gamedev companies in the Central/Eastern Europe over the last two decades...and if I recall correctly, some people in Eromancer's team were from Ukraine and most likely ended up in Poland or other surrounding countries.
Now, a different problem is that he relies too much on people he knows which is rarely the cheapest option and far from the best. I myself am showed time and time again that taking cheap/free services from "friends" is often a road to higher costs in the long run because they are people and they still want to be paid...or else they'll just do a shit job, not because of malice but because they are not motivated hard enough.
