What the hell happened with getting rid of PS3 limitations?!

[Hestzhyen]

I really don't understand why anyone would want to limit their ram to what was standard maybe, a decade ago by using a 32 bit OS... Whatever floats some peoples' boats tho.

A lot of people don't even know what RAM is or what it does. They just know that what they have works and that's all they really care about. And, truth be told, unless you're doing something WAY intensive and outside the norm you don't NEED to care, not right now. As programs grow more and more resource-hungry that RAM limitation will start to hurt. But we're not at the tipping point for that yet.

Apple's put their foot down and has told people to update to 64-bit or be left behind. Do you want to bet how many people will stick with what they have until it has a catastrophic failure? I'm thinking somewhere around "a lot", until the hardware that supports it becomes so obsolete it would be worth more for scrapping than refurbishing and trading in.

If you want to have mass appeal, you want your game to run as wide a variety of systems that you can reasonably support. SE learned that the hard way when 1.0 was STUNNING for the time but required a behemoth of a machine to run passably well. There will always be a lowest common denominator and right now it probably is the budget 32-bit PC. But like Tridus said, the biggest issue SE has right now is more on the NOC side of things- data transmission costs, data storage costs, and space constraints. That doesn't really have anything to do with the client's horsepower, it's all bandwidth and capacity. There's not enough and I'm willing to bet that whatever they have isn't used in an optimal way based on all the severe restrictions we've dealt with over the years.