Sandbox games, loosely speaking, don't need much of a story, since what happens in the game is up to the player.

Does Demigod have a campaign mode? The story is usually fleshed our more in there.

Do we care?

Nope....

The games stand on their multi-player appeal and re-playablility

It does have a story, 8 demigods vie for being a higher level god.

Stardock is the publisher, Gas Powered Games is the developer, what does 2k have to do with anything?

And strategy games are far, far too story-based these days. Strategy games need strategic context, not narrative context. Granted, Demigod has neither (being an MP skirmish game, basically), but if they were going to add a substantial single player mode a story driven "go here do that" campaign would be the least interesting possible option (and the same goes for Sins, by the way).

Bloody hell...why are people nowadays never happy...

Do this, Add this, Nerf that, .... Do you ABSOLUTELY need a story....do you even CARE about a story?

you want a story.... MAKE ONE! Have fun

But it is. DOTA didn't have any story whatsoever. Demigod has very detailed backgrounds for each character. Since one "tournament" is essentially a full game what would you have them say for each round? Its hard to expand on "Rook plays Mandala", "Rook plays The Brothers".

Tutorials are for noobs, stories are for books.

Granted, if I were making this game I would have made a tutorial knowing full well that many players are in fact noobs.

How did 2K games get into the picture?  

I remember brad (frogboy) once saying there wasn't "designer" positions at stardock and there probebly would never be. But rather everybody worked on the design together as a team.   The talked about it sounded to me like some common programmer annimosity against "The idea guys"  (not meaning to stereotype, but I have yet to hear this kind of things from artists.  I blame the fact that most young 'designers' don't really seem to know a thing about code.  To give another example, some alumini programmers came back to my school for a lecture and were talking about their time out of school and what their companies were hiring to have.  Somebody said "well, what about the designers" and his responce was "oh, your one of those people.  Yeah, we don't talk about designers" )  

I can't blame them, even I (who considers myself a designer) have met  many of these 'idea guys' who kinda discust me at how little design on the code-level they can do.  

anyway, the point I'm trying to make is it has nothing to do with laziness.  It has to do with design choice.  2K games (I assume you're refering to the Civ series) didn't have story until the 2nd expansion pack of Civ 4 just because they choose not to focus on it.  

I think there was just miscommunication in the previews. The game was being advertised as an "RTS with RPG elements", which will attract people from both those camps who are used to having story modes and campaigns. So I guess that could have been more clear before the game was released. And no, TF2 doesn't have a story mode but Unreal Tournament (2003 at least) *does* and so does Street Fighter 4, and how much more multiplayer can it get eh

A tutorial is always good, because yes you can learn what everything does by trial and error, but it's just much easier to have a quick 15 overview of every button, how you score points etc. Always more clear ingame than in a manual picture with 15 arrows pointing at it It's not about being noobs, it's about knowing what's going on.

To be honest, creating campaigns takes more manpower to write a level than what ironclad or stardock probably has, I once did a course, on game wrting, it took us 3 months just to produces several campaign level not even enough for one race, and our prof is actually a person who works in the gaming industry professionally

Err, Gal Civ 2 and its expansions each have a camaign, so Stardock is clearly capable of producing one. That doesn't matter of course, since neither Stardock nor Ironclad developed this game, Gas Powered Games did. GPG has produced dozens of AAA story driven games, so I really don't think ability is an issue here.

They wanted to make an MP focused game, so they didn't include a campaign. There's nothing wrong with that, and it doesn't require excuses.

if excuses of being meanly a mulitiplayer game is just wrong, there are alot games have a great story/campaign and mulitiplayers, such as starcraft, COH, C&C, warhammer 40k 2 and more. and there are all rts.

also campaign isnt all about story telling, its teach player how to play the game.

and i am not here saying the demigod is bad, cuz it doesnt have a campaign mode.  i love the game, its fun and very different from anther games. its just hopeing there is a lot more stuff in it.

there are tons of game with great story and gameplay. such as bioshock, freelancer, Psychonauts and more.

yes but those games are not multiplayer based. Also some of the best games have no story, quake, unreal tournament..

so story is good, of course but just like sports, multiplayer games do not need a story!

soccer, the most famous sport is just a bunch of guys going at it with one ball (lol?)