Er.. if you were a business, would you post negative press about yourself? Not unless you're an idiot you don't. I wouldn't post anything but the highest scores..

Even so, this game is garnering great reviews.

As far as multiplayer goes, I wholeheartedly agree! I thought this ages ago. Why in the world is multiplayer such an asset? Typically it was boring, slow, and tedious. What I really wanted while playing some of those games was a game with great AI, so I wouldn't have to play long, slow, drawn out games with players who typically were mediocre players anyways! And I never understood why turn based strategy games were docked for not having multiplayer, if it had great AI in lieu of this.

If waiting on 6 other players is your idea of "fun," or you actually drag your PC to some lan gaming night, I guess you might disagree. For myself, I hated games that catered towards multiplayer, because I hated playing against slow, poor real players. I wanted good AI, instead.

We're a minority I'll admit. Some people play chess by mail. I like to play Civ 3 by e-mail. I would very much like to play GalCiv 2 by e-mail, but it's clear that will never happen.

As has been noted by others in this thread, there are few real upsides for Stardock by prominently mentioning "bad" reviews - or even "moderately good" reviews. So quite often, we don't.

Think about it: What could Stardock say about problems - valid or not - that are highlighted in such reviews? It comes down to either saying "yes, we think you are right" (which would imply that we should have fixed the problem/implemented the feature before we released the game), or "no, we think you are wrong" (in which case a certain proportion think we're dismissing valid concerns).

That is why game companies only post the best reviews - because ultimately, all others are likely to do is to give someone an excuse not to buy the game, and it is management's duty to avoid that. Educated consumers can and should make use of tools such as GameRankings.com to confirm that a company is not trying to pull the wool over their eyes. We encourage that, because educated consumers are less likely to avoid buying the game just because one reviewer has a problem with it.

We're also not the only people affected by how well the game does. Stardock is actually in a better position to respond to reviews than most developers, because we don't have a separate publisher to keep happy. Still, we have distribution partners who would be rather upset to hear that we were doing things that might discourage people from buying the game, especially right after release when they have lots of boxes to shift.

Be assured that we do consider all published reviews when the time comes to actually improving a game, even if we do not state so publicly. If nothing else, we want to be able to show to each reviewer that we fixed their problems, so we get a better grade next time! That's assuming they're not making completely ridiculous demands, like multiplayer . . .

Everyone that plays a game is affected by its graphics and sound, not everyone is affected by its multiplayer component because many, many people don't MP. This is the fundamental problem with gaming press, they assume everyone is a multiplayer gamer and review accordingly. Largely this is because people that are in the gaming press have a large group of other folks to play games with, and simply can't be bothered to realize that many other people don't game the same way they do.

So no, MP is not necessary or even relevant to a large portion of the gaming population. Marking down a game for lacking MP, then, is a disservice to all of us that play pretty much exclusively single player.

You'll note that the reverse never happens, by the way. A game whose SP sucks but whose MP is excellent will frequently get excellent reviews all across the industry.

Multiplayer gaming is important to many games because good AI is hard to do well, and has to be maintained against player tricks to stay good. If social interaction with an intelligent opponent is a part of the game design then social interaction with other people is a reasonably close approximation to this.

However, there are certain disadvantages to playing with other people - and you can spend almost as much time figuring out how to stop them gaming the protocol as you would have spent stopping them game the system in the first place.