It's disgusting in the sense that it's a horribly poor valuation of their work by consumers - each of those games is worth approximately half a latte.
The sad part is it'll be celebrated as a victory because they'll gross a lot of money and it's "money they wouldn't otherwise have" ... unless they set their own price and reached a tiny fraction of the consumers that'll buy their games today.
Which they have done before now, and will continue to do after. You seem to assume that these are brand new games being rolled out with this pricing scheme - all of them are over a year old, some 3 or 4 years. Do you really believe that they would make the same amount by continuing to sell old indie games at their own prices and without a buzz-generating promotion?
That's true, except the bit where there's plenty of evidence to support the theory that people are willing to pay more than a dollar and change for a game.
The thing is that by making the prices so low (as low as one feels comfortable paying for them), they increase their sales number by much thus helping counter the low price.
Without this event there would be close to no sales since some of these are pretty old games. 40$ * 10 sales is much worst than 2$ * 1000 sales.
It's a little better for the developers than that... like $1.23 per game:
"By default, the amount is split equally between the seven participants (including Child's Play and EFF), but you can tweak the split any way you'd like."
I don't even play games and gave them some money and I will most likely never play any of these game, other than probably just check them out once. I can only hope there are others like me who would never spend a dime in any form of games.
What is disgusting about it? $1.72 per game is more than $0.00 per game. They are making money the easiest way possible here. Everyone can simply download the games without paying a dime, but so far more than 30000 people decided to send them money and the counter is at almost 250000 dollars.
Depending on the total sales, they may get more than a MacHeist bundle.
A few friends have been approached for MacHeist and only offered $1-10k depending on the bundle. A friend went through with it and got $2k cash and a few little extras for giving away his app to 400,000 people.
Business 101, if incremental costs are low, go for higher volume. The incremental cost of selling 1 more copy of the game suite are basically zero. Cents or perhaps even fractions of a cent. Thus, it makes sense to ignore per-transaction revenue and concentrate on total revenue. If you're able to make 2x or 10x as much revenue even though the per customer revenue is smaller you've still made more money at the end of the day.
Indeed, you've made more money and more people are using your product (many of them paying less than they would otherwise).
In business terms this is called a WIN/WIN situation.
(Consider all the products which used to be expensive but are dirt cheap today. Do you think it's "disgusting" that you pay your ISP a minuscule fraction of what you would have paid per byte per month back in the dialup era?)
It's a nice PR move but that's just disgusting I'm sorry.