US is huge, i'm 100% certain that he could move to a cheaper location if that was a concern.
And with the Internet there isn't really a reason to limit yourself to people from US, a fraction of that would be enough to contract people from EU (though i'm certain you can also find people from US with much less than $500k/year-$1m/year to work on games).
And with the Internet there isn't really a reason to limit yourself to people from US, a fraction of that would be enough to contract people from EU (though i'm certain you can also find people from US with much less than $500k/year-$1m/year to work on games).