Once a PDF is produced, no work has to ever be done on it again. It can take advantage of the "long tail" of sales in ways that print never can.
True, but most sales of any RPG product (PDF or print) is in its first month of release. Over the course of several/many years the long tail of sales can achieve something, but only with a stable of many products (100+) can any publisher afford to wait on such possibilities. In the mean time, all freelancers must be paid either before publication, or as partial proceeds over the first year. For smaller products that's not too high an upfront cost, but for adventures, setting guides, or anything more substantial than 30+ pages of content it can be an exorbitant cost, and hoping that in the next few years (during the long tail) a publisher may get out of the red on a given product, but they may not. On the other hand a failed print product can easily kill most small publishers. Its a terrible risk to go print product at all.
For example, if we lowball certain costs. Cover art at $50, 1 piece of interior art per 4 pages of content for a 48 page product at $20 per piece is $240, 1 map at $50, writer/designer and editor getting $.03 a word each for 30,000 word product is $1800. That's a total cost for creation whether it goes to print or PDF only for $2140. A normal expectation for a small publisher of sales might be 60 sales in the first year. A $15 product at that cost will need more than 2 years worth of sales to break even - no profit earned yet. If you beat the price down to $5, its going to take more than 6 years to break even. Is that a viable business model?
Ultimately, though, it gets down to what the public is willing to pay. I'll pay $5 or less for a PDF if (and only if) there is no print edition and I really want the game. If it costs more than that, I simply won't buy it. Whether the company that puts it out can make a profit or not is immaterial to the consumer.
To you maybe, but I too am an RPG product customer and I buy both print and PDF products, though mostly PDF these days. I've paid as much as $19 for a PDF, though $10 - 15 per product is more common. I have paid as little as $5 for a product, but that was generally a very small, low page count supplement. I generally won't pay more than $20 for a PDF, though there certainly are PDF only RPG products that cost more than $20. I don't believe I've ever seen a full game at only $5, except perhaps the lightest ruleset, minimal type game.
In the end what is "immaterial to the consumer" may very well spell doom to the RPG industry, let alone the American (and other) economy and job market. I know that the common Japanese mindset is not to have every convenience in the home, rather only buying the best quality products, so the average Japanese household does not have all the conveniences of the average American household, because their buying mindset is completely different than yours. Price cannot be the only measuring stick to base purchases of anything - that kind of thinking will destroy the west. I know as a consumer that quality and content is more important than price, and I base my purchases on far more than price only - its very material to me.
Time will tell what the "magic number" for rpg PDFs is. When it comes to novels, it's working out to be about $2.99 - $4.99 for fiction that isn't on the bestseller lists and isn't put out by big name authors.
Novels have lots of words so writer and editor gets paid here, as well as the cover artist. Novels are far, far cheaper to produce than any RPG product - very much apples and oranges. You can't base the price for one with the other, as the cost differences are exceptionally different.
