I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I'm Australian; I know the pain and sheer bloody-mindedness of regional price-gouging from personal experience. On the other hand, determining the correct pricing model for a digital product available in regions with vastly different economic circumstances is always going to be a challenge.
The consumer part of me feels as though the publishers should just suck it up, and stop trying to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to globalised markets like the internet. After all, it's not as though it costs them any more to sell the game in one market or another. There's no logistics issues to deal with, so why do they think it's justifiable to charge more? Translations? Then why charge more in regions where the native language of the game is the same?
Then the pragmatist in me pipes up. The above arguments work well to argue against price-gouging, but they don't really work when you include markets like Russia where the median household income is around 3/8 of what it is in the US, and game prices need to be adjusted down in order to be viable at all. In order to truly flatten the globalised pricing you would need to then offer the games for the same price in other regions, which is effectively what happens with gifting were the status quo to be maintained.
So now everyone is paying $10USD for a new game, which sounds pretty sweet in theory. However, to make things fair, you then need to drop the price of the games at retail to match so that people who buy physical media aren't at a disadvantage. At this stage you start to lose money, as your production and logistics costs totally eat away your income and you're left with nothing or less. Obviously this doesn't apply as much in places where retail is effectively dead for PC games, but if I had to guess I'd say that publishers want to have a unified position on this issue across all of their platforms. And even in those places, you would kill it off once and for all with this approach.
I guess I'm saying that I agree with this move but only if it remains limited to markets where games need to be sold at a steep discount because of the gulf between their economy and the US (which is the defacto standard economy for Steam prices). Pricing up is effectively a gouging strategy though, so I remain opposed to it without reservation.
