Something like the Dreamcast (or Nintendo's obscure 90's online services) is excusably old enough, and burdensome to Sega's business strategy. There are also community hacks to play those old machines online, even though PC is a superior platform for online retro-gaming (incl. emulation). The Wii and the U are modern enough (broadband era) where maintenance mode would be a rounding error. In cases like the first two Xboxes causing problems for Xbones' Xbox Live, Micrsosoft should have released a patch making it easy to connect an older console to a community ran master server. That'd be preferable to rearchitecturing to P2P.
For example, every time I check in with the Kawaks community, it's still going. Maybe not as strong as it once was, but I never had trouble finding a game.
Right in many cases, I'm specifically criticizing Nintendo. They have abundant capital and willing manpower (internal or contract), but their c-suite has a track-record of wanting control over their consumer base. If Wii online was burdensome to maintain, it's because they had an entrenched engineering culture that made patching the Wiis less sensical than the fitness of a stereotypical US Southern inbreed. Uii and 3DS discontinuation was Nintendo wanting to milk customers within an acceptable level of negative publicity.
Something like the Dreamcast (or Nintendo's obscure 90's online services) is excusably old enough, and burdensome to Sega's business strategy. There are also community hacks to play those old machines online, even though PC is a superior platform for online retro-gaming (incl. emulation). The Wii and the U are modern enough (broadband era) where maintenance mode would be a rounding error. In cases like the first two Xboxes causing problems for Xbones' Xbox Live, Micrsosoft should have released a patch making it easy to connect an older console to a community ran master server. That'd be preferable to rearchitecturing to P2P.
Agreed.
For example, every time I check in with the Kawaks community, it's still going. Maybe not as strong as it once was, but I never had trouble finding a game.
Right in many cases, I'm specifically criticizing Nintendo. They have abundant capital and willing manpower (internal or contract), but their c-suite has a track-record of wanting control over their consumer base. If Wii online was burdensome to maintain, it's because they had an entrenched engineering culture that made patching the Wiis less sensical than the fitness of a stereotypical US Southern inbreed. Uii and 3DS discontinuation was Nintendo wanting to milk customers within an acceptable level of negative publicity.