you know what I think? I believe that they are keeping the team small, thus most of the money doesn't go into the game. they keep it for themselves and this would explain the slow updates.
unless you can prove me wrong, what else is there to say?
I mean, you can go back and watch some of their office videos and he says they have 16 people, even if he includes himself and Gumi into that list, that's still lots of people to pay. I'm not sure why so many people think what they make on patreon per month is alot, but if you have that many people on your team and you're not a total piece of shit and pay them a decent wage, then that money per month is actually not a whole heck of alot. If it was just the two of them as it was in the early stage, you may have some sort of hill to stand on. However, we know they have a decent sized team for indie standards and this isn't the hill you wanna die on.
Too many people expect triple A timelines for games when those studio's have hundreds and the bigger ones have thousands on payroll to churn out mediocre unfinished games in a 5 year window.
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Even if you ignore livable wages for the employees that still leaves the bills for the space I'll assume they rent, the taxes they have to pay on what they earn from patreon as they're not a non profit, office supplies, utilities, the ever changing flow of maintenance and parts for roughly 20 systems and anything else they might have to pay for like if they use autodesk maya and however many licenses they would need to have. Last I checked you can get autodesk maya for 3 years around 5,625 usd. I don't personally use that as my tasks require autocad, but if that is per license then that is a decent sum of upkeep money and if you pay per month or even annually on those types of licenses you end up paying more.
Too many people see a little bit of money and just assume that should be enough to run and maintain a team over a dozen people, but that is childlike thinking and you're not looking at everything running a business requires. You just see how much they're getting monthly and assume that is lots of money. If it was a solo developer, then yes, it would indeed be quite a bit of money. But we're talking about a team and the expenses a team of their size that is required to run without going into the negative.
Now I don't know how many of his employees do what. But if we take all the averages for most of the job titles in the videos where they're located. The average wages are between 40k to roughly 60k with the higher end being art direction I believe. If you can figure out how much that is yearly vs how much they make a year on top of all their non employment expenses you will begin to understand why what they make isn't at all impressive if the goal is to be filthy rich as they edge you for months with their (your opinion) slow updates.
