Hi, Dev! Long time follower. You’ve answered a lot of my questions and I haven’t sent one in some time. Nintendo announced that they’re shutting down Pokemon Bank for 3DS. Other people ask why they simply don’t leave it up. Why do services like this get closed down exactly? Is it because someone still needs to be paid to maintain it and it’s wasteful?

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?…