I could care less if a game's based around multiplayer as long as they point out that fact in the advertising. something like "Greatest Multiplayer Experience of the 21st century" or something like that to warn the rest of us who hate multiplayer to buy something else. Otherwise, its like your elementary school bullies asking if you "want a sandwich". That's part of the reason i bought a wii, because my cousin and half brother had 360's, and all the big name games had incredibly short "beat it in a day and only did so to unlock the ultimate gun/vehicle" single player campaign and the rest of the games' use were multiplayer. No games are more guilty of this than Halo and CoD. You see all these epic commercials for them, promising the "gaming experience of a lifetime". Never once mentioning multiplayer in their commercials, which makes the general public think that the game overall is epic, and not just the multiplayer.
an overall epic game is like Portal, which i watched a friend play to completion, or Sands of Time. Notice that at least the latter has no multiplayer.
The point is that games can be good or bad without multiplayer, and if a games only good feature IS the multiplayer, then we need a new genre for them. Kind of like how online RPG's are now known as the MMORPG genre. Why can't we have a genre called MFPS(Multiplayer First Person Shooter)? in order to seperate games for different tastes.
I can't really imagine people back in the days of the atari had to classify their games in genres other than adventure or shooter. Remember Pong? did they need a genre for it? no.
Games as they diversify to satisfy different tastes, need more genres to categorize them. Time travel back to 1994 and ask yourself back then if there was such thing as an "mmorpg". You will find them looking slightly confused before holding out a copy of Legend of Zelda and asking something along the lines of "did you mean this kind of game?".
Over the years there have been many subgenres created. From casual games to the ever popular FPS to the ever devotedfanhoarding MMORPG. We don't even need to call them MFPS. at some point after wolfenstein the distinction was made between first and third person and even over the shoulder shooters. The original blueprint for the horror genre has been labeled "Survival Horror" while the genre of "horror" is left to you with a machine gun and squishy monstrosities in between you and the end credits.
So try this one: SPFPS, Single Player First Person Shooter. A way to label games so that the general public has a clear distinction about a game made for online playing and a game made for single player campaigns.
This would also boost profits for games both "FPS" and "SPFPS", because the design teams for the former wouldn't have to create a single player campaign at all, and the latter won't be desperately pouring every bit of excess funding they have into a shoddy multiplayer in an attempt to be more like widely popular halo.
This works with other genres too. Basically anything with a strong focus on single player campaigns can tack on the letters "SP" to the front of their genre and call it a day without wasting money on multiplayer.
This seems to be the only solution i can find to gaming's future. You see, the more games based on multiplayer with bad SP campaigns come out, the more jaded someone who likes at least a BIT of alone time with their controller will get frustrated, and eventually turn to other means of entertainment. When that happens, I imagine it will only take about a decade for a mass exodus to have occured, leaving gaming itself to be defined by two classes of gamers, Online Gamers and their multiplayer, and Casual Gamers and their PopCap.
Now before you get all /\/3V4R 6U/\/U HAP3N /\/0013|=461 on me, yes, i do know there will still be hundreds of gamers who won't give it up no matter how horrible they get. But for every gamer that's too determined to give it up there are ten more who'd rather put their time into something other than whiny 14 year olds screeching "FAIL NOOB" into their earpieces. and of that 10, in the timespan of a decade i guarantee you 8 will give it up for either Peggle or researching for the American Cancer Society, or whatever your country's variant thereof, or robbing a bank, or getting onto the local and/or foreign government's most wanted criminals list.
Maybe i'm a chicken little here, but all the bullshit i and my friends have dealt with from the game companies lately creating worse and worse single player games has us at the point of swearing off all but Rock Band, DDR, and Minesweeper and doing something else with our lives. The only thing that stopped us from making said pact is that we really don't know what else we'd do with ourselves. Given time to think however we're starting to come up with some scenarios.
the point of this overly long post meant originally to only contain paragraphs 1, 3, 4, and 5 is to point out that this multiplayer thing IS NOT for everyone. I, personally, trust yahtzee's opinion enough to factor it in, along with my friend's opinions of the game and opinions of some of the guys at the counter(who are suprisingly honest about a games quality outside of multiplayer), before i buy a game. If he started focusing on the multiplayer aspects over the single player, he'd lose the trust and loyalty of the vast amount of us in the gaming community who'd rather play their little cousin's Animal Crossing game than deal with the 14 year olds aforementioned 2 paragraphs.
On top of that, part of yahtzee's charm is that the only greater talent he has than for picking out a game's flaws is exploiting them in windows movie maker. Something that is not so easily done without adding in certain players screennames in a rage unquenchable until one hears on the news that a 13 year old boy named Willis Thomson killed himself last week after 4chan got a hold of his xbox live username xXN0013CRU5H3R1337Xx. (DISCLAIMER:Not a real name i just made it up. Actually it might be but i don't use xboxlive so i wouldn't know.)
tl;dr: Yahtzee is a hairy jesus defending the silently lurking hordes of Single Player gamers from the zergling rush of Multiplayers until they can form a perfect strategy to successfully nuke them without losing their fellow brothers/sisters in the battle.