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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.