Best Of

"The reason I wanted to see who that person/business is, is because I just wanted to see what kind of work volume and quality gets him/them that kind of financial revenue, and to better understand what is the level that one would need to reach in order to have realistic aspirations to such success."

Well ... I'll be blunt and state that this alone shows that you are missing the point. No one in the whole history of craftsmanship (digital or otherwise) ever got filthy rich because of the "level they reached" or the "volume and quality" of their output - from stone carvers, to painters, to watch makers, to movie prop artists, to CG enthusiasts. That's just not how these things work.

Being an excellent crafstman gets one stable contracts, and/or a stable salary.That's it. Crafstmanship "level" doesn't scale up infinitely, hence the salary or fees don't scale infinitely either. And of course output volume is limited by time, so in order to increase it the only way is to scale up, like Neox mentioned it multiple times. And from there, prices can get higher because studios are very willing to pay more when they know that they are dealing with a boutique that not only delivers flawless quality, but also delivers it consistently and reliably.

But even that won't make the CEO of said boutique "filthy rich" - it will simply allow for a comfortable standard of living. I think.

The "filthy rich" bracket is another thing altogether, completely unrelated to craftsmanship. Investors, CEOs or big film/gaming companies, and so on.

Now all that said there are indeed artists who strike gold on their own - but that's pretty much never because of the "level they reached". It's either because they put together a transformative idea that they executed well on (innovation) ; or they created an IP so catchy that the publishing rights and/or royalties led to big money (One Punch Man, Attack On Titan). And ironically, these manga artists are far from "top craftsmen" in their field but rather they created stories and IPs that just work well regardless of how polished the art is. The CG/game art equivalent of that would be Minecraft and Roblox.

Aaaanyways. Romanians, man.