P2P absolutely costs them money. They use servers to host matchmaking and connect players, keep track of ratings and leaderboards, etc. They also host servers to keep the games updated and content (like the events in Smash Ultimate) streaming to your console. Does this cost a lot? Absolutely not. But it does cost something. And the more people using it, the more it costs them.

They also continually make new free updates including balance changes, new content and such for most of their online titles. And cloud saves cost money for them, too. So does developing the infrastructure and porting the NES games to the system. That last one can’t cost much, but it costs something. They may not cost much to run, but they aren’t charging much for the service. The NES library alone is worth $20 a year and doubly so once they add SNES . And that’s just a small piece of it. And the family plan is so cheap I can’t fathom how they’d make any money if everyone used that. It might not even cover their costs. $4 a year per person? Can’t understand how people can comlain. A single latte at Starbucks costs more.