what like 1,000 an hour
No, but there are a lot of factors. Caveat: this level of frankness may get me in trouble but we'll see.
First of all, a team worth having probably won't work by the hour. They would need some guarantee of getting paid or they would want to take a cut of the final game, etc.. Usually the latter is a situation where a developer already has friends who can help and ropes them in. Spontaneously creating such a productive environment is nearly impossible.
A general rule is that an employee will cost about 140% of their salary. This is due to the required (by law) benefits and various state and federal stuff that must be paid (unemployment insurance, etc.). Contractors are no better as their multiplier is usually 2x.
Moreover, I do not have time to manage a team without quitting my current job. Given my situation with family and so on, I would need a solid health insurance package and sustainability for at least a year. Even cutting my expenses to the bone, this is a decent sum that I don't want to discuss here.
Good developers that would really carry the project would at minimum command salaries around $100k a year. Junior level developers of decent quality might go for half of that but then I would need more of them.
So you start to see that even trying to fund a small team starts to look like $500k to $1 million. There is no way that I could even fund that much with Kickstarter given the current state of the game... and Kickstarter comes with some long term downsides that independent organic funding doesn't. And anyway, even if I went that route to fund the game development I have many months of development ahead of me first.
On the other hand, if the game would be even moderately successful as a Kickstarter then it would also be moderately successful as self-funded through regular donations... which I already accept.
It's extremely frustrating but every time I work out the math and the long term goals of the game... and believe me I do this about once a week lately... it still works out better for me to continue to try to grow organically as I am now. I will reserve the option to use kickstarter to fund certain more specific milestones like the mod store and such. Or maybe down the line to hire artists for specific blocks of work or something.
In the mean time, I will work around my wife's illness and the demands of my day job and try to push the next release out. Since I have to take a lot of time off from work lately, every donated dollar really does affect how much time I can devote to the game. My wife and I often refer to life expenses these days in how many "mythruna hours" they cost. So it's a pervasive theme of direct trade-offs these days.
