Multiplayer (and specially with crossplay, nowadays) is one of the best things to keep a game selling over the years. A strong community is either built by heavy modding capabilities or multiplayer (or both!) You can see 5, 10 years old games with a very active community exactly because they are multiplayer. I'm not saying this would be the case for JA3, but it happens. As to the development discussion, never saw any great game turning into a terrible game just because the developers spent some time/money implementing multiplayer...that's a so absolutely amateur, naive and shallow thinking. Multiplayer or not is simply a design decision. We're not talking about those micro-indie "one-guy programming from it's basement" "companies".