Yes, I was being ironic. I am genuinely surprised (in a good way) about the Steam Box stuff. It seems like a good fit, I just didn't expect it.
True story about Paradox and being mainstream:
As an academic, I often attend conferences. But the biggest one I attend regularly is the Congress of Medieval Studies held in Kalamazoo Michigan every year. It is the biggest academic conference for all things medieval in the academic world. (As in, any intellectual you've seen on History Channel documentaries is there.)
I am just a no-name guy still working on his PhD, but I love networking there. One of the things I do to network is participate in the "Festive Gaming Workshop" hosted by the MEMO group. (We do all the multimedia medievalisms, including games.) For the past two years, I've brought CK2 on my laptop and shared it with the academics who come and see what's cool in the industry.
It literally takes me an hour to explain CK2 to these folks. And being medievalists, they have all kinds of detailed questions, like "Can I imprison those heretics?" and "Did you just borrow money from those Jewish communities and then kick them out of your realm? I just wrote an article about that stuff for an academic journal." It always steals the show and the younger academics all want to run out and buy a copy.
So, the great irony is that CK2 is popular among those with enough education to appreciate the game's mechanics... but they are also not mainsteam audiences, either.
But the products sell themselves when someone can sit down with it. The real trick is getting it to people who would enjoy it and pay for it. And so, getting it to more people in general is always a good idea.
(Too bad the older academics are frightened and confused by computer games; I'd love to see a CK2 MP game between the top five medieval historians featured on the History Channel for the past ten years. We'd see how they really think.

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Son, I've gone from hipster to "get off my lawn yelling at cloud old guy." It's a fine line.