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Comment by wilsynet | Hacker News Reader

The people responsible for Civ 6 are advertising multiplayer online play in an effort to take your money, while investing the least amount of money to say they delivered the feature. They are just milking the Civ franchise for all they can.

Compare this to Amazon AWS, YouTube, the iPhone, Microsoft Excel. These products make a ton of money and the companies that own them invest heavily.

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With the exception of AWS, do you believe that any of the examples you cited are not “just milking the franchise for all they can”?

When was the last time YouTube, the iPhone, or Microsoft Excel added a meaningful (i.e. users wanted it) feature?

AWS is the worst offender. They don’t allow you to set hard limits on billing, claiming that is for your own good, while the fact is they are putting all your data on hostage so they could force sell you things at ridiculously high traffic price at the next unexpected traffic surge. Traffic price into AWS is free but traffic out is extremely expensive, preventing you from getting data out of it.

Excel brings out new features all the time while keeping 100% backwards compatability. The difference in features between old and new versions is staggering. They knew parts of their usage would get replaced by other software if they don't innovate, and so they did.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan to use Excel for all the use cases it's being used for, but it's probably by far the most versatile software out there and powers more businesses than any other software.

EDIT: And if you need an example for a new feature that users wanted, I heard a lot of people being really happy about the introduction of XLOOKUP, introduced very recently.

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