I will say this again, the act of sending discs (DVDs or CDs, not hard drives) between friends is something that, while it was done by some people in South Africa as well as many other parts of the world, was and still is limited.
This isn't because the infrastructure supporting it is poor as much as because it costs people money; money they may not be willing to spend on people they don't personally know or trust. You are, from what I can tell, a kid. You have, from what I can tell, luckily not been screwed over majorly by anyone before.
As such, you likely don't see the personal security risks, the financial security risks or the other risks that one runs by performing such disc trades with people you do not personally know.
Hard drive swaps are multiple times more risky, as you're sending a several-hundred-rand reusable device to someone else, not a once-of disc costing a few rand.Again, sending discs from a *games retailer*, such as BT Games, would be a costly exercise for the company itself, nevermind the clients.
1. Someone has to source the data. This costs bandwidth used as well as that guy's time, costing the company money.
2. He has to write the data to a disc and verify its integrity. He also has to make sure to work against a checklist of requirements of the client and potentially add in some 'value added services' such as subsequent patches the client may not have asked for, if there is space left on the disc. This, again, takes his time and effort up, and thus costs the company money.
3. He has to prepare the discs, possibly label them and get them into casings and prepare them for being mailed. This takes up his time, costing the company money.
4. He has to get the disc to the courier or post office; someone has to either come and fetch it, which costs money, or someone has to go and drop it off, which costs money.
To save on step four, this would need to be done in once-daily batches; if a customer asks for stuff after the company has already dispatched that day's packages, that customer has to wait till the next day for his package to be prepared, and then wait another day for it to arrive at his premises.
This goes back to the three-day argument.
Next, as I said earlier, for some games, expansion material is free. As such, anything labeled as an expansion may well not be legal to charge for, even if you are charging for only the service of distribution, as the vast majority of the world does not have to pay for it; why should some little backwards country be allowed to monetize and make business of distributing something that's free?
Look at Ubuntu as an example. The officially supported distributors are allowed to charge for nothing but the disc the distro is written to and the cost of posting it to you. They aren't allowed to charge for their time/effort put into their writing of the disc, preparing it for you and posting it.
When it comes to expansions such as those for WoW, you can just as well get the expansion boxes directly from your local or online retailer, as even if you buy them online towards your account, you still have to download the content. That takes WoW out of the picture almost entirely.
Now getting back to the argument of expansions vs patches, a few key differences set the two apart.
Expansions:
1. Major content additions in the form of new textures, models, NPC entities/items (not modifications of existing items as would be seen in most MMOs, WoW and EVE included), whole new models+textures for entirely new entities or items.
2. Major changes to game mechanics that ultimately change how a massive portion of the game is played; think sovereignty changes for EVE, if you follow its development or play it at all.
3. 10x+ the size of any general maintenance patch for the 'expansion', keeping in mind that some patches for WoW weigh in at an ultimately unjustifiable 130mb or so, even when they add no content beyond 'event' content related to a fictional or out of game holiday or such. These, if anything, would count as mini-expansions or event content updates included within a patch, similarly to what was seen in EVE with the addition of faction warfare specific LP store offers.
Patches:
1. Fix identified bugs in game mechanics, NPCs, items or general game code.
2. Make minor changes to game mechanics to tweak balance in the game (think the recent Druid changes for WoW - these changed how druids were used a lot, and came in a pretty beefy patch, but would you consider that an expansion when all it's doing is changing stuff that already exists in the game?).
3. Add or remove information, such as quest/mission information, item information or the like as necessary for consistency in the game content - information modification which in itself just not justify being labeled an expansion, or even a mini-expansion.
4. Fix exploits.
From an entrepreneurial aspect, this idea was flawed before the launch of the now-cheaper uncapped accounts.
Refer again to the aforementioned 30gb local only accounts, and keep in mind that there are business offerings for uncapped local only accounts available with a variety of ISPs; this ignoring accounts such as the one Openweb had available for a brief period that had entirely free, unmetered local-only uploading.
For 30gb, you could easily download all of the content for WoW, including all its expansions, from a local source; this right up to the latest patched version of the game.
You could also fit in getting the EVE Client installer, which weighs in at sub 3gb and is patched up to the latest, if not just behind the latest version of the game.
You could also fit in Guild Wars with some of its expansion packs' data.
You could still fit in a variety of other things, such as map packs or custom content for non MMOs, including fat patches such as those for TF2.
All that for ~R130 for a 30gb account, before these uncapped accounts came about at what essentially boils down to R200 for roughly 100gb of data on 384kbps.
This still doesn't even take into account the variety of 'broken' DSL accounts that various ISPs have had available for years, allowing dozens of gigabytes worth of data for prices under R200. That data, at full international rates. This, again, ultimately boils down to a situation of customer awareness and utilization.
It is again important to take into consideration the cost of bandwidth just to play some MMOs, completely disregarding the patches or expansions that come out for them. Some of them take up quite a large chunk of cap, WoW being a prime example.
If you are at all into market manipulation in EVE, you'll again use up massive amounts of bandwidth, as market transaction updates and the like can easily rack of several megabytes for just a few minutes of tinkering or research.
Then there is VoIP, commonly used by those playing MMOs as a more convenient method of communicating with their friends.
Then you still have the monthly subscription(s) to take into consideration.
If a guy is paying R150 for one game, he has only one game to patch or get expansions for. With a game like EVE, the expansions generally weigh in at sub 1gb and only come about twice a year; easily manageable by even a 5gb account, especially considering the player is forewarned of the expansion several months in advance. For a game such as WoW, as covered earlier, you have to pay for the expansion to have it linked to your account anyway, so you might as well get the boxed version by the time you'll have spent money on the bandwidth AND buying the expansion online.
If, on the other hand, that guy is playing several MMOs, such as WoW, EVE, AoC, WHO, he's paying R100-R150/month per game.
Surely this guy can afford to spend money on the cap he's already burning up to play all these games, not to mention the time he's investing into each (time is money)? Hell, he probably also has an expensive PC given the requirements for a game like AoC, not to mention he likely has a 4mbps connection.
, the idea that I had was to have a system where a retailer could send ( on a disc through the post) patches to anyone who's bought the original game but didn't have the required bandwidth to download the patches. I realise that even then there will be more legal complications than whats its worth. My bad for not posting my idea correctly.