While I respect your happenstance, I feel you are an outlier in a world of Xfire & Vent. When playing games, I rarely have the focus to carry on a chat conversation with other people if those people are not involved in the game I'm undertaking, for the same reason I don't talk on the telephone when trying to play Starcraft.

Starcraft II players can and do talk to WoW players all the time. It's not just Steam that does it, but Steam's ability to do it is pretty invaluable because it makes the "community" vastly larger then that of any one game. Networking effects are powerful.

People playing WoW & Starcraft II online are the group I was talking about getting use out of Steam and community features.

Playing the single player Fallout, I have zero use of community features. Steam is nothing more than a memory hog at that point, a pointless interface I never use. I've never even brought up the interface there.

This is a personal preference, and not a universal feeling amongst the larger majority of gamers. While it would be nice to be able to disable the interface if you just don't like it or use it, it does allow many very nice features for those who want to take advantage of them. For instance, the interface allows me to check the time and my current power levels, as well as viewing my cd key and friend's list.

Yeah. I find the Steam overlay invaluable in New Vegas. Largely because I can read Gamefaqs without having to quit or minimise the game

Online polls are notoriously inaccurate for marketing purposes.  All that number means is that the majority of people who stumbled across and bothered to vote in the poll want multiplayer.  Also, 61 people is a statistically meaningless sample size.

Ten thousand people on the forum would still be a statistically meaningless sample size due to selection bias.

You can't take much from it except that we can't find anybody who wants the existing competitive style MP play (either because they want no MP, or because they want MP that has the SP features enabled).

Yeah Age of Wonders:Shadow Magic ai really suked. I played with max ai all on highest difficulty and I could take everyone of them out so easily. For the love of god(s) please make difficulties taht say hard, hardest an impossible live up to those titles. I am so sic and tired of higher level difficulties being braindead easy.

What I hate about MP figures for TBS games is that the only source (typically) they're able to poll in terms of data is ONLINE.  Admittedly, this is anecdotal, but I don't know anyone who plays TBS games online with random people.  I do, however, know piles of people who play TBS games cooperatively, generally over a LAN or LAN simulator.  Those people are not being tracked.

That being said, it has to be understood that the MP community of any game, especially TBS, is a small minority.  For me, though, I won't purchase a game that doesn't have multiplayer.  I'm a social gamer (in the literal sense, not referring to the new "social game" trend)... this is a hobby I share with my friends.

I don't regret purchasing E:WoM because I want to support Stardock, but none of my friends have picked it up because the MP is just so damn bad, and there's no way I can recommend it to them.

Not happening unless there is a setting for how long the AI can "think" about its moves and you set it up a good bit.

Considering the primary method for playing a multiplayer game requires at least touching Stardock's servers, they can get pretty reliable data.  Sure, there are ways around it, but its certainly not a majority of the players doing it.  With all due respect to yourself and the others of the same opinion on the thread, your experiences and the experiences of your friends can not be counted as a representative sample of the community (of those that own the game, even of those that play it).

While it impossible to prove either way (currently) the fact is that there is enough reliable data out there to establish a standard that multiplayer functionality is not an extensive component of gaming today except on those games dedicated to it.   Unless you're willing to provide evidence to the contrary your opinion is meaningless.

The numbers stated are sighted as being for the entire genre, and not specific to Elemental. All the statistics for Elemental tell is that no one wants to play Elemental-lite in MP (only 121 game at the time of this posting, and only 2 ranked players).