I doubt Paragon salaries are that high, probably average is around 50K or less. I am assuming they are using the asian salary model more than the US one. (I have worked with several large Korean company staff members over the years and their compensation is fairly low range for their positions -- I assume the managers and seniors may are making more but the lower end positions are making less)
I assume that with benefits they are a bit over $3M, plus even if NC soft is providing GMs and servers I can promise you that Paragon pays for it on their balance sheet as a transfer payment.
Most likely the largest expense historically was backbone/transport. Fortunately those prices have been dropping like a rock in the last 5 years. I saw some interesting studies about the backbone costs on Eve many years back. The serverfarm/data costs were more than half their outlay including development.
One other thing, for GR you can assume that at least some of the ramp of employees was based on contracts and not full time hires. Those would NOT be counted in a layoff but they would be gone when the downramp occurred.
Personally I think the surge in FTP games is driven in part by the fact that backhaul is so cheap now that as long as they don't have to scale their serverfarm up with NEW equipment that there is very low to no net cost for the free players.
For an example of a dead game that is still running, look at the state of Warhammer... Once they killed off Mythic and merged them into Bioware the staff on Warhammer was transferred to other products.
CoH is nowhere near that point, and after the streamlining recently I suspect their localization costs are down as well.
Its certainly in better shape than any other game in the Genre.
thanks