When bittorrent was released, I saw the technological aspects as groundbreaking, thinking it would be repurposed for much more than ISO downloads and mass media distribution. How did the technology not become a more popular way of distributing via crowdsourcing large community datasets, such as openstreetmaps, or something like distribution of Android rom updates, when the costs of distribution are so expensive?
Probably because bittorrent didn’t have any way to rank users based on how much they seeded, and also the fact that it wasn’t configured properly out of the box with basically every program that I have viewed. By default, bit torrent destroys the CPU in your router with as many as 500 active connections.
Another reason is that so much software is commercial, and these companies want to maintain control over the servers for tax reasons but also so they can end the products life very early and try to force users to buy new versions. Not every video game does this but many of the more corporate and publicly traded ones do this.