This is the only answer i know of that holds any truth to it

Many of Sony's 1st-party online titles are server-client models, which are inherently more powerful than peer-to-peer, in the grand scheme of network game architecture.

On top of that, one of those intensive mathematical things the Cell happens to be excellent at, is character animation. Increase the number of animated, vertex-skinned characters in an environment, and you increase the advantage the Cell has over the Xenon in a pretty big way.  If you're only considering character animation as the problem, the Cell is just plain 2-3x faster than the Xenon, and that's only if the Xenon programmers were really hardcore about performance.  If you were comparing GPU fillrates as the singular issue, I believe the 360 would look pretty spectacular.  

Most of the time, games are balanced in these areas, and it, more or less, evens out.  If you up the number of characters onscreen though, you're definately playing the PS3 song.  More characters, no matter how you look at it, plays right into the strengths of the PS3 and Sony's online services.

Perfect Dark Zero supported 32 players at the 360s launch.

I personaly prefer playing 16 v 16 , anything more and it becomes 10 X harder to complete objectives , deathmatch is alot of fun though. I wouldn't say it was unplayable , but with the exception of DM it's just madness.

yeah sony is goina have to be very carefull with mag, one little mistake and the whole game could turn into a chaotic d*ckfest.

I agree that online shooters are often just as fun with 8 v 8 as they are with 32 v 32, as long as the maps are designed well for the player count. I have to confess that I prefer 32 v 32 Battlefield 2/2142 games to smaller ones, but console games are usually designed around 16 v 16 or smaller.

MMOs would be the coolest thing the PS3 could do with loads of characters at once, IMO.

They're not shooting for it. 360 is as capable of having dedicated servers as PS3, but these massive matches can get chaotic. Take a moment and picture the best online experiences you've had in various genres. How many would be improved with 10x the people? While I think a MMOFPS type game might work with with large numbers of people... where traveling is involved and there's not going to be too many in 1 area... I think taking a fairly standard shooter and just upping the person count makes it terrible. Too many people talking, too many bullets flying for even the best of players to survive respawns. (unless it starts you way out of combat, which is also infuriating)

I actually love 30v30 in R2. The epic scale of the battles are fun as opposed to spending half the time just looking for people. I'm mean 2v2 was fun in the N64 era but that was 15 years ago.

atleast half of the players must have slow internet. I am surprised that depite having a subscription, there aren't any dedicated servers

+1 I was going to post the same thing, it depends how it is handled by spawn points.  For example in resistance 2 you never feel like you are looking for someone to kill, this is because you can spawn any where and there is always someone fighting in that area.  Killzone 2 is outstanding about spawn points due to the fact the tactician can create his own spawn points, this makes capture and hold agressive and you never feel like you have to run to catch back up where your faction is fighting at.  I believe I read that xbox live does only p2p client profiles and sony uses dedicated servers.  Plus they do not call the cell "the broadband engine" for nothing, it can scale tell it's heart is content and never will you see any lag.  I have also read that even in the 60 man matches on resistance that scalability is great when the match starts with 12 vs 12 and then more people jump in and it scales all the way up to 30 vs 30 and you do not see one lick of lag period.  It has to do with the infrastructure that was put in place on the server software and server side and the capabilities of the cell itself.