I’m curious if anyone has any direct knowledge about that.
There are so many professional activities similar to that where no one makes any money and people really just do it for the love, and then there are seemingly similar things like that where people make surprisingly large amounts of money.
There are also several solo/small shop developers that do make a living from selling plug-ins. Here are a few that I can think of off the top of my head.
Auburn Sounds: https://www.auburnsounds.com/ Valhalla DSP: https://valhalladsp.com/ Kilohearts: https://kilohearts.com/
It's hard to tell how much Duda is an outlier, though, and how many other people could succesfully follow his path.
One of the things I've also heard from labels is that not only there's money in the VST world (it's also very crowded, piracy is rampant as noted, etc.), a lot of plugins are ported over to iOS and are sold as "virtual pedals". The number of sales and revenue there was noted as being very interesting.
I made fun of him and we wouldn't have trusted it to be used live, but damn it worked impressively well
But you have to be willing to put in the time and make phenomenal products, because no one wants average instruments and effects, we can get those for free.
($1200) https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bund...
($300) https://www.soundtoys.com/product/soundtoys-5/
($500) https://www.arturia.com/products/analog-classics/v-collectio...
However, piracy is also pretty big when it comes to plugins.
>Do solo or small shop vst plugin developers make any money?
It doesn't have their breadth, but the tones it does have are nearly as good as it gets without serious air movement.