As was said Steam presence is very good for marketing and gamers population.
I think this Game must be on Steam.

Dude, you must´ve been living under a rock.
DoW 2 got plenty of publicity and hype, being the next game in development by Relic after Company of Heroes.
Which was the single highest rated RTS in the world.

And what you call simplification, I call for innovation.
The game came to be less about turtling and zerging with 20 of the same units.
And instead became more TACTICAL and reliant on adaptiveness and guile, rather than stratagem and turtling.

steam is good for sales and publicity. but you can run this game as all the other games. only the launcher will be installed in steam but the servers and the other infrastruction of the game is out of steam installation.

Its a business decision that behavior has to make and I see no point in discussing it in the forums. Steam has no impact on the game. Its a distribution platform, it really makes no difference to people who already are interested in the game. If they choose not to use it they probably found a better alternative.

Valve doesn't run third party servers, also what is the issue with steam? steam is great, I have all my games on steam and I would love to have EC on my library aswell.

Although, i'm not saying I WANT it on steam, I would just like it, I'm still buying it either way.

Also, if you're forced to buy the game on steam it's not steam's fault, it's the devs' fault for not giving the non-steam option, many devs give you the option of buying it off steam, minecraft does well on it's own without steam.

I don't see how someone can dislike steam, but if you do then ok that's your opinion, but I see no problem with having both options like many games do.

You also have to admit that steam helps a game gain popularity, many games try first on their own but once they start losing it they resort to steam, RIFT was removed from steam after it went F2P and now it's back.