As of 10:30 on May 6th, that bundle has managed to snag $365,000 at an average of $7.90 per purchase.
Of course, there's no way to tell how much went to developers and how much went to charity, but if we assume that it's an average 50/50 split (for no reason that it's the default and probably the most fair), then that's $187,000 to five developers, which when split that way is $37,000 to each one.
Obviously only barely a living wage, and weighted differently for each developer. For example, Wolfire Games who made Lugara HD has four people, where as Aquaria developer Bit Blot only has two. Likewise, World of Goo (2D Boy) and Gish both had about three developers, and Penumbra has four. The sale continues for a few days yet, so we'll see what the final tally is, and maybe even someday find out how the split went down. These guys won't be making EA type figures anytime soon, but if developers could pull in numbers like this, they could at the very least make a living doing video games.
It also shows that $7-12 may be the video game sweet spot, and that a pay what you feel model may be a feasible way to run the market in the future. Obviously without hard sales figures, this is more of a dumb exercise than any kind of serious fats about the industry, but I think at this point there may be a small future for indie games publishing.
SIDE NOTES:
Sales figures for GISH as of 2007 - Interesting to note is that over a 3 year period the game pulled in roughly $121,000, a large chunk of which was IGF winnings. From a pure income perspective, that's $40,000 a year split between 3 guys, or roughly about minimum wage earnings. Ouch. Add to that a more than 90% drop in sales by 2007 and a different story starts to emerge.
Sales Results for 2D Boy's previous Pay What You Want model for World of Goo. Again, a different story kind of emerges here, that maybe the pay what you want model has a future, but that a price floor might be a good idea.
