With recent posts from the SimCity team regarding offline mode and why cities can’t be larger it got me thinking.

Why does such a limitation exist in this day and age?

After only a few minutes of thinking back I answered my question: your average PC gamer isn’t power hungry for more GHz or RAM like they used to be.
How do I know this? I used to service those types of people.With PCs lasting longer than they used to people find it very difficult to completely replace their PCs every 3 years, or even replace the CPU, graphics card, or bump the RAM.

Now things like RAM are easy and cheap to upgrade.
CPUs are trickier, as some games don’t benefit from CPU upgrades, and others can greatly.
Graphics cards are shorter term but more expensive, and the market is also flooded with so many makes and models.

I can see why it would be difficult and it’s hard to justify the expense.

However I think another factor is Windows XP.
Yes, it’s still on many PCs and I don’t think we’ll see a surge of capabilities in PCs until it is nearly non-existent in the home PC market.

Once XP is out of the picture, hopefully supply will outweigh demand for a while and prices will drop. Then we just need to motivate people to upgrade!