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> so as long as enough people pay for online

This payment only funds the console's matchmaking services. The cost of maintaining dedicated servers falls on the devs for third party games, and presumably a different budget for first party ones. So the, admittedly few, games with dedicated servers (e.g. Splatoon 1) can't survive in this payment model either.

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Splatoon 1 doesn't have dedicated servers, the matchmaking is done on a server but the game itself runs peer-to-peer

You're right, my bad: a quick search lead me to think that it had some server dependency that had been shut down prematurely, before the console's own online services.

I'm guessing the matchmaking is part of the Wii U's shared online services and not game-specific.

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