If you do the math (assuming his quoted numbers are literal, which they aren’t), he’s asking $24,000/year for full time employment. Given that this is contract work and he lives in the US, he can expect to remove 30% of that due to taxes, so he’s looking at $16,800/year. If he’s living alone, that’s $700 under the poverty line for Utah.
He’s asking for $12.5/hour, which is a little more than entry level at McDonalds here in the US.
I’m not sure what field his experience is in, but if he’s an engineer of any sort of value, he should probably be charging a lot more. Most contract engineers I’ve worked with and hired in the past charge $60/hour at least, though they were experts in their field. Personally I’d never pay anyone that I thought wasn’t an expert in what I was paying for. Making games is hard enough already - you don’t want to compound an already complicated situation by doing something wrong the first (and second, and third) time.