*sigh* This same discussion every time.
People who oppose regional pricing refer to the regions that get HIGHER prices than the base (US) one, like the EU and EEA, including the poorer EU countries, sometimes even non-EU Serbia and Montenegro, AU/NZ, sometimes Japan... People who support it refer to the regions that get LOWER prices, like Latin America, former CIS states, China, where not banned Russia (for which massively lower pricing was initially introduced, not because of the purchasing power but to make legal purchases compete with the powerful Russian "piracy" market).
The thing about basing it on country is that you can't make it fair for the people. There are plenty of poor people in wealthier countries that are doubly harmed by it and some wealthy people in poor countries that doubly benefit. And even at country level, it's not fair overall, because it's not actually based on purchasing power, but on marketing and sales. For example most African countries generally don't get regional price cuts because publishers don't expect sales there anyway, so they just don't bother, even though if you'd base it on disposable income they should get the lowest prices.
Still, despite such differences remaining inherently unfair either way they're applied, I wouldn't personally complain if the regional pricing matrix would just have one maximum price that'd apply for all the wealthier countries (US/CA, Western and Northern Europe, AU/NZ, JP, probably South Korea), and either the same price or lower for the rest. But make sure that no non-wealthy country pays more than a wealthy one.
Of course within a country there are differences, but I don’t want to force people from a region where there are orders of magnitude different purchasing power to pay a relatively insane amount of money for my products.
I hope you understand that it doesn’t make any sense for those cases.
Calling this “rotten” makes you look like a heartless fool.
But sure I agree that this would need some proper tuning to apply correctly. It’s a good practice if applied sensibly, imo. And I believe that the current global flat rate is senseless.
Again, while still unfair, if you'd want to offer discounts to some regions, I wouldn't personally take a stand against it. But if you claim to do it for such reasons, you should strive to apply those discounts for all poorer regions, not "forget" about those that actually are the poorest, like I was saying about offering discounts to Latin America or China or the former CIS region but not to (most of) Africa or Southeast or Central Asia...
But what I really do take a stand against and call rotten is if you'd (also) want to apply the typical 1 USD (for US price) = 1 EUR (for EU price, even for non-Euro countries) rate, or similar price hikes for UK or AU/NZ, because there's no way to claim that the purchasing power there is far greater than that of the US (except in Luxembourg), and in most of the EU it's lower.
Edit: So an acceptable regional pricing scheme would involve a flat price for the wealthy countries, no possibility for regional pricing between them, and let's say we can define wealthy as above double the world average taken by purchasing power parity, which actually gets us at the moment to a round number of 30 countries, down to NZ, as per https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/gdp_per_capita_ppp/ And for any other countries you could set the price as a percentage of that base/maximum one, which percentage must not exceed 100%, and any price you set for one country automatically becomes the maximum one for those ranked below it. That should fully cover the cases you use to argue in favor of it, correct?
But it's not how typically it's done...
