I'd guess the cost of maintaining contracts to distribute licenses for games that publishers otherwise don't want to sell anymore.
> Not that that stopped Nintendo, they took everything down for the original Wii, purchases and all.
Yeah, this one was heart-breaking. A lot of my friends started getting real leery of digital purchases after the Wii debacle. At least the X360/PS3/Vita/Wii/WiiU have been cracked wide-open and the modding community can keep them going at this point - we've still got that to hold onto. The PS4, on the other hand...
But you have to do it in phases to manage the negative feedback. If someone purchases a game on Day 1, you definitely don't want to kill download access on Day 2. So the only way to cleanly phase out is to first shut down any new purchases. Then you have a ~4-5 year window for people to play those games and hopefully give an upper bound for when they won't care about them anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d buy that too.
But if it happened, I’d be more than a little scared about the viability of game development moving forward, particularly for the artfully-crafted single player experiences I enjoy and care about. More scared than I already am.
Nintendo would much rather port Mario Galaxy to their new hardware and sell it as part of a much smaller bundle. And as far as I’m concerned, that game is great and they have every right to continue charging top-dollar for it.
To be honest, I still don't understand why they needed to shut the storefront. They still need to host the games so people can access the titles they've paid for, and I would imagine that makes up the bulk of the cost.
The only reason that makes sense to me is that they have plans to shut the entire thing down, including access to purchased games, x years down the line. It's probably much easier to get away with that if even the newest purchase being removed is however many years old.
Not that that stopped Nintendo, they took everything down for the original Wii, purchases and all.