Just for argument sake, Jeffe, I think you have some faulty reasoning. First all of the Steam Punk references you mentioned are ancient in publishing. Barnes and Noble and other book distributers generally consider anything that was printer over 2 years ago, to be ancient. After two years a book has reached it's peak as far as potential buyers. Sure there will be a few, but for the most part the book is just hogging valuable shelf space. The most recent publication you mention had a 2000 publishing date, which makes it old.
Not true, GURPS steampunk and Gurps Falkenstein (which has dual rules) has been subsequently reprinted, I think its on its third or fourth printing. Space 1889 was just reprinted and Fudge even has a Steam Punk Setting out... add Victorian Vampire, The Mad Science Wackiness of Savage Deadlands (soon to be released) and the sleeper hit Gaslight and you have a really crowded genre.
The other problem is that you seem to think that publishers care about having a fan base. Fan bases are nice when you're George Lucas and know that you can't really produce anything of quality, but you still want to make money. For the rest of us, we need new blood. That means that we need to wow those people who are unfamiliar or only marginally familiar with our product or genre. Does that make sense?
Thats my point, nothing about this game has any wow factor, it doesnt take advantage of the genre, and it devolves into a rather boring treatment of european history. Which isn't that different than now.
Heres a concept from the book for example. European society is less advanced than it would have been in real life because of Magic (the greeks and Romans did a lot with it) but somehow magic fell so completely out of fashion that Europeans took to technology to replace it.
So Europeans are magically the inferior of every other culture and their technolgy doesn't give them any advantage that magic doesn't, yet they've somehow managed to take over the world.
How? If a Chinese sorceror can summon an Army of undead ghosts who are impervious to harm and the British Marines have cannons that cant hurt them how do the Brits win?
I mean its a book that touts the idea of social revolution and then glosses over the need for that revolution.
I also hate that they made most Africans into Orcs, personally I think that is just tacky and crude.