[Done] Ryzom will move to a real Free to Play concept! - OFFICIAL NEWS

They have employees etc. Again even if it only cots them a 100 a month to host the server theres still their employees pay checks. If and i sure they do have a 3d art team in the us the starting slary is 40k usd for a 3d artist out of colledge.

As far as I know, the only full time employee is ulukyn (dev & server manager) ; there might be some people who works as freelance from time to time, but nothing like a full time 3D artist : they are 100% volunteer.

I think you are grossly overestimating how much money ryzom gains : I remember numbers from Tamarea saying there is 300ish logged on at peak on weekday, and 500 at peak on weekend. This mean that, at most, there is 2000 paying account (and that's a very optimistic estimation, imo), which is not a lot of money (barely enough for server + ulukyn wage, basically)