There was more incentive for it to become widespread in Europe due to the religious reformation. They had to print that religious propaganda!
I don't see any reason there couldn't have been a need for propaganda to be printed en masse against the Ming, Confucian/Buddhist ideas or even an invading power eg. Mongols, Manchu or Japan.
It definitely could have happened, so making it have a 0% chance of happening in game is simply unrealistic.
The simplest one was that effectively no one could read it. Nor was there much incentive for the common man to learn to read.
Christianity, and a lesser extent Islam, had religious motivation to learn to read in order to be more pious and read the scriptures. Part of the crusading mentality was a massive upswing in devotion by the laity and the use of various prayer books, devotional material (e.g. biographies of Saints), and even the Vulgate Latin Bible among those learning the classics. By the time the printing press arrives, Europe has higher literacy rates than China.
Which makes sense. Such holy scriptures as Confucianism had, need not be learned by the masses. And with the examination system education was something to be bought for a reward, mass literacy would only have greatly increased the competition in an already brutal competitive field (and when Christian missionaries did start mass literacy campaigns in the 19th century, China's examination system started failing more people and exhibiting more corruption that helped spark the bloodiest conflict before the World Wars). In general, most societies in history had stable low literacy rates, particularly among the common folk, and no incentive to change that.
Islam might have had some incentive, but the premium placed on raw memorization and the institutional preference for scribed copies (along with an alphabet optimized for cursive writing rather than printing for the holy language) drastically reduced the appeal of printing in an Islamic context (so much so that more Qurans were printed in Venice than the entire Islamic world combined in the early era).
And the reality is that even with the Reformation raging, and pamphlets printing out in mass runs, most European printers went broke. You need an extremely high volume of demand for printed work to make the industry flourish. And while lower cost printing can increase demand, it does so but very slowly. Instead Europe started the 15th century with much higher literacy thanks to the increasing fervor of the laity that both powered the Hussites and increased use of devotional literature. And once Hussite ideas about the primacy of scripture were more broadly adopted, there was a real and uneconomical push for mass literacy. The sheer volume of popular text written for the (Counter) Reformation is likely more than all popular text written in the history of the world before then combined.
