Your Winky not withstanding, I said with a guaranteed minimum amount, either at the current levels or higher to catch up with inflation.
If the prizes are a significant portion of it, it can’t. The absolute maximum payout per episode, assuming the same person answers every question correctly, every Daily Double are on the lowest scoring clues, and this absolute monster of a contestant goes all in on each of them and Final is about 200k, if I’m doing calculations correctly.
Most of the budget (whether it’s actually 2 million or not) is probably toward the host/announcer/crew’s salaries, material costs for maintaining the set, paying for Clue Crew travel, and such things, only the last two of which are at all variable, and probably not significant portions.
Since I apparently noticed this too late to edit - for this calculation, it’s also assumed that the DDs are the last clues picked.
According to this calculation, the maximum a contestant could win after DJ is $283,200. Double that in FJ and the max winning amount is $566,400.
I just looked up Alex’s salary and its 10 mil a year, about 40k per EP. They have about 8 writers, let’s say 1 mil a year each, which sounds very high to me. Producer makes 2 mil a year, I have no idea about that. Now we are up to 80k per EP. After that there are camera operators, maybe an assistant producer, do they have grips and best boys for a game show. You have the staff to interview contestants, I guess legal. Even if all of that combined adds to 20 mil, again that seems way high, we are up to 160k total. 20k in winnings average for an even 180 k per EP
Check my math
… Jesus, I see where I screwed up…I calculated each round separately and forgot to include the Jeopardy! round total when calculating the Double Jeopardy! Daily Doubles. 
Do you think anyone on that show pays for travel? Those on-site clues (which my wife and I call “time sucks”) are 95% paid promotions.
Frankly, I’d love it if they ditched the Clew Crew all together!
I came out with $566,400.
Math upon request.
If one player shuts out both of the others, do they even bother with FJ?
If only one player has money after the Double Jeopardy round, then they do play Final Jeopardy with just that one player. I haven’t seen it happen for ages, though, and when it did, Alex would reveal the contestant’s wager before their response to the clue.
When calculating the highest possible winnings, are you putting the Daily Doubles in the top row of clues? I don’t think that ever happens; I’ve only seen them in the second row and below.
Because theoretically, a DD CAN be on the top row, that calculation provides the theoretical upper limit to a perfect game.
I don’t think it can. I read somewhere that the show deliberately never puts a Daily Double in the easiest row.
There was a Daily Double in the top row less than two weeks ago…
I’ve never seen that before, and I’ve watched a lot of Jeopardy!
I wonder if they changed that rule, or if what I read was incorrect.
Self-explanatory graph (although two years out of date).
I get why the rows would be variable, but why the variation by column? Is there some deliberate pattern to which kinds of categories go in which column?
I probably should have said to take it with the proverbial grain of salt.
Quora is a Q&A forum. Here is the Wikipedia article.
Here is the thread I was quoting.
For another perspective, here is an article from The Atlantic. (Spoiler: no clear answer)
I proposed that amount as an unlikely high outlier. Off the top of my head, I’d guess the average would be around half of that, which I stipulate is still substantially more than the current fixed value of $3000. I’ll try to keep track of the values in the coming week.
Never would I have guessed that unicorns were Biblical creatures. Laughably I guessed “Gargantua”.
Hey, I guessed “Minotaur”!
I guessed unicorn, because I read this thread before the show was aired in my city.
Spoiler tags next time, please.