Telekill wrote: I'm not sure if Sega would be willing to have to put up money for leaderboard servers and what not.
In the case of PS4 and Xbox Live, that's not a problem.
Leaderboards are hosted by Sony & Microsoft on their respective servers and are part of the console's integration with trophies/achievements. The native functionality is generic and provided at a console level, so it will continue to operate as long as PSN / XBL are supported on those platforms. I can't give you proof of this for Sony since their stuff is only available for developers, but here's Microsoft's
leaderboard API for Xbox live.
The only stuff you'd have to worry about being shut down would be game specific content. In Shenmue passport's case, since none of it is realtime they could theoretically just build some web-based APIs and those would be cheap to maintain since they could be hosted by the same servers that host their other websites.
I don't think we'll get a direct port of Shenmue Passport though. It's just not something that games do nowadays. I would be surprised if some of the features did not return as extras, but I can't see them keeping it as-is for a direct port.