Technology.
I play Battlefield 2; it’s a kick-ass FPS. EA, the publisher, has a long and storied history of releasing many, many (needed) patches for the series. They just released the latest for BF2.
When I started to download the file from their site (this is EA, largest game company in North America), I was getting about 26KB/s down. Yeah.
After an hour (of an estimated 2.5 hour download), I searched up a Bittorrent link from 3DGamers.
Current speed: 239.2KB/s, 24 minutes total download time estimated.
I’ll leave it to the brain trusts at the various publishers to figure that one out.