I'm not sure if this is the best place to put this, but here it is. I honestly never got too far into the first edition of Pathfinder. I purchased the PDF of the core book, looked at a few of my friends books, and played in a brief online campaign. The complexity and sheer amount of material kind of turned me off. However, now I am older and wiser and Second Edition has regained my attention.
The first thing I did was check the set PDF prices for when the books come out, as owning a very large hardcover book doesn't appeal to me at the moment. I was surprised that the core rulebook and first bestiary PDFs are only going to be 15 dollar, as that seems like a great deal. Then I saw the price for the PDFs of the setting books that are coming out not long after the core, and was surprised that both were about 25 dollars, only about 10 dollars cheaper than the hardcover.
Why is this? The books are going to have much lower page counts than the core rulebook and the bestiary. It seems like if anything, they would be cheaper. From a business standpoint, it only makes sense if they are looking to capture the attention of customers with cheaper PDFs for the beginning books, then offer them more expensive PDFs after they are already interested.
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PDFs of core rulebooks are offered at a discount so customers can pick up the basic ruleset at a low price. The usual price Paizo charges for PDFs is about 70% of the print price.
If they follow what they did with P1e, it won't be just the begininng PDFs that are cheap, but all the PDFs in the rulebook line.
I'm not sure if this is the best place to put this, but here it is. I honestly never got too far into the first edition of Pathfinder. I purchased the PDF of the core book, looked at a few of my friends books, and played in a brief online campaign. The complexity and sheer amount of material kind of turned me off. However, now I am older and wiser and Second Edition has regained my attention.
The first thing I did was check the set PDF prices for when the books come out, as owning a very large hardcover book doesn't appeal to me at the moment. I was surprised that the core rulebook and first bestiary PDFs are only going to be 15 dollar, as that seems like a great deal. Then I saw the price for the PDFs of the setting books that are coming out not long after the core, and was surprised that both were about 25 dollars, only about 10 dollars cheaper than the hardcover.
Why is this? The books are going to have much lower page counts than the core rulebook and the bestiary. It seems like if anything, they would be cheaper. From a business standpoint, it only makes sense if they are looking to capture the attention of customers with cheaper PDFs for the beginning books, then offer them more expensive PDFs after they are already interested.
I think you answered your own question there.
There is also the OGL aspect; most of the content in the CRB and other hardback rulebooks are OGL and available on Archives of Nethys and similar with the setting text filed off. Adventures and setting books don't have as much content that is free avaiable.
The PDFs have the information in a much prettier form with nicer formatting (for reading not necessarly rules references) and have the setting info and the like without the genericization.
But yes; core content PDFs are cheaper to encourage people to buy them; less widely appealing content has a higher PDF cost and at a guess I would say Paizo probably makes the majority of its income from people buying things other that the corerules (AP subscriptions and the like).
It’s also, I think, an anti-piracy measure. They make the rulebook PDFs fairly cheap to make it easy for interested players to “do the right thing”.
The other PDFs don’t get such a discount because they aren’t the rulebooks and probably won’t sell nearly as many copies. They can’t make up for as much of the production cost with volume, volume, volume.