Aside from the fact of a company closing itself are the costs that high to maintain a working server to enable online play for older systems , I.e the saturn / dreamcast ?
Yes. It costs money to keep things up and running. The hardware that's bought/leased/used is often meant to handle a lot more activity than what's ultimately present when they evt. pull the plug on something, but migrating it all costs money too (and requires someone to handle the migration and all that). Keeping things on life support also means you have one additional *something* in your system to keep track of too (economically, support, responsibility, staff, etc...) In some cases, certain things have the benefit of leeching off of the same hardware/servers as other services, which usually means they manage to stay persistently alive (see legacy LIVE support, which finally got axed to remove the restrictions imposed by it)... even if they were a bit of a failure in the eyes of many (Just see how the Japanese Biohazard: Outbreak on PS2 is still alive and kicking, apparently thanks to it using the same service as the Monster Hunter games does.)
I recently priced a proper web server, and costs are high. Your looking around 5k or so for 1 blade, rental of half a rack, a connection and various other shit. Keep in mind, this installation was at 151 Front, but if that's just for a single server, I dread to see what multiple servers would cost! Ryan
The biggest cost is bandwidth. Also, as servers get old, the maintenance cost increases. Eventually the hastle of replacing a server is what will end support for a game.
The biggest cost actually tends to be space/maintenance. If you go with a datacenter bandwidth is usually pretty unlimited (at least here at TerreMark's NAP of the Americas it is) but you pay for space on a shelf, power, and cooling. Then there's got to be someone to make sure it doesn't go down, replace hardware if necessary, etc. Of course if they wanted to legacy GCN or PS2 server software could probably run side by side with newer stuff on the same machine and not even be noticed because of the relatively low resources they'd be using. The only issue would be the fact that most people fear running more than one thing on the same server (compounds the possibility for crashes or whatever). The biggest thing though is that there's simply no benefit to them, if anything taking down old online services could force users to buy newer games or hardware to get their online fix.
