Anyone who's watched that demo has noticed exactly what he said, that their demo is basically a 2D tilemap of a few repeated 3D objects, most likely to make the memory requirements of storing voxels at that level of detail feasible.
I've been told by jobs both local (in ND, not that it matters) and remote that my wages were being determined by looking at the local average of people with my job title. It would be hard not to know that your salary is scaled to where you live.
Another issue besides roots in moving is that higher wages always come with higher costs of living. I own a house where I live which has a lower mortgage payment, by far, than a small apartment in SF. Granted that comes with downsides: no decent curry, bars that can't make a manhattan, etc
Glad to see it's not all gloom and doom. I released a game on the market last week (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.interrupt.retrospa...) which has gotten 3500 downloads, earned me $1.30 in ad revenue, and enough in paid downloads to pay for a latte. I'm planning more updates and fixing things based on reviews and feedback so I haven't given up on it yet, but gaining traction is going to be slow from what I can see.