You aren’t being punished. People living in richer countries tend to have more money to spend on e.g. games than people in the same class in poorer countries, this is simple economics.
If a gamepass is $5, and you make $10 an hour as a cashier, you only need to work for half an hour to be able to purchase it. However, a cashier living in e.g. South America might need to work a full hour to earn the same money, ergo the actual price of the item is twice as high for them - it’s a matter of perspective. If you halve the price of the gamepass for the South American, it means that both you and they worked the exact same amount of time and were able to purchase the same product. You are not being punished, as nothing changed for you. Instead, more people are able to access a commodity that you would usually have access to.
Regional pricing benefits the developer significantly. The same players that would not be able to justify many purchases, now have prices adjusted in such a way that they can spend the same amount of money as before and get more benefits. This means that more developers will get paid, and even though the prices are lower, and developers get less - getting $2 is better than getting $0, and this adds up quickly. It’s important to note that this isn’t a move to punish anybody, but to level the playing field.
You’re comparing apples to oranges. A computer is a physical item, which takes actual real world resources to build - lithium, steel, copper (lots of it), plastic, etc etc etc. Due to globalisation and the massive industrialisation in East Asia, prices for these resources are pretty much the same everywhere. Your graphics card gets produced in e.g. Taiwan, and then gets shipped to the US, UK, or wherever the consumer lives. This means that the only pricing difference is in shipping, but the materials required to build it and the labour cost a fixed rate for the consumer.
The 100% online service (game, gamepass, dev product, etc.) has nothing to do with real world manufacturing. It’s pricing is not based on real world resources. Digital pricing is often just driven by the idea of maximising profit. Since regional pricing results in more sales, this means that profit is increased, therefore digital prices are often localised to countries. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Steam [publishers] and many other big tech companies adjust their prices for this exact reason.
