I was rather surprised how much money he is making. I'm living in germany and I don't think you can get even close to such amounts in any gamecompany here. Even as lead getting above 70000$ will be hard. Also from several own applications I had the experience that game companies tended to offer usually more than 1000$ less per month than any other programming companies. Is that different in the USA?

If you're a game programmer here you simply don't do it for the money.