Keep in mind chief, that the primary distribution method for north american subscription mmorpgs is disc. So you really only download the patches, which are smaller.
for f2p the ONLY distribution method is digital download, since the game client itself is free. Saves the publisher money, and really no point to print discs for free games, right?
so the downloads you are seeing is the entire game. Given the size of some of the gameworlds, the clients are rather small for some of them.
Actually I bought WoW online and downloaded the game, it was not too bad. The worst part was downloading a 2 GB file, then it says it needs to update and downloads a patch. Like 5-10 times. Why not roll the whole thing into the latest patch? I guess it would suck for people already up to date.
Also, I think that WoW streams a lot of the game world as you go along. I'm guessing that while it makes it simpiler to update things, the f2p games would rather have you download the whole shebang once and have that server strain once than have you constantly streaming map data as you roam.
I might have to boot into Win7 and try some of these. The D&D one looked interesting to me before, but I never tried it because it was on windows only. I don't know if my MacBook Pro can handle it though, looked pretty graphics heavy and WoW can make it choke on max settings to the point I only get 25-30 FPS.
