Hi, Dev! Long time follower. You’ve answered a lot of my questions and I

You are correct that they would need to keep staff on payroll to handle maintenance and customer service in case players have problems (e.g. requests for restoring lost special pokemon through server or human error). These staff would not be free by any stretch. That's one of the bigger parts of it for sure, but not the only reason.

Did you know that Standard Support for Windows 7 ended in 2020? Critical patch support ends in 2023. What do you think will happened to old software that ran only on Windows 7? Some of those software publishers stopped support of the Windows 7 version shortly after Microsoft did. There's definitely plenty of Windows 7 abandonware out there - either the publisher no longer exists or they've chosen to stop supporting the product.

Software like the Pokemon Bank back end isn't built in a vacuum. We build these using other software - operating system, middleware, databases, or other stuff. Often, load-bearing software programs that were perfectly reliable in 2014 have become abandonware in 2026 for various and sundry reasons. Beyond this, there's also more and more legal requirements around user data now, which legacy software like Pokemon Bank may not comply with. Bringing it into compliance runs afoul of even more of these abandonware issues, making updating the bank a "not feasible" situation.

Note that this is all speculation. I'm not privy to Pokemon Bank's implementation, toolchain, or anything else specific to them. I am familiar with legacy codebases though, having worked on several older live service games in my time. The number one cause of End of Service is the continued cost to benefit ratio, but dealing with abandonware and compliance issues is an ongoing problem every live service has to (and hates to) deal with.

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