When you use Steamworks, you're making a trade off. You will lose some customers. Similarly, not having your game at retail is a trade off. It's one we made with Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. We lost vastly **vastly** more sales not having it at retail than we did by using Steamworks. But the trade-off was that we were able to have a release date of our own choosing and frankly, if I have to choose between money and having a universally beloved game people like, I'm going to choose the latter every time.
Personally, I don't like games requiring to use Steam. But, as a developer, my options are to either spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing stuff ourselves or letting Steam do it.
The only reason Elemental isn't using Steamworks is because I personally vetoed it. The IT team just hates having to keep running the rather expensive infrastructure we have to add, update, and deliver games to users. They'd rather hand it all over to Steam and be done with it so that they can focus on other things. That's the trade off we're facing.
The DRM thing that I've seen people mention is meaningless. That's not the reason companies use Steam. They use it because Valve is willing, for free, to handle all the updating and distribution. It costs us about $10k per month just for Sins of a Solar Empire dedicated bandwidth for the hundreds of thousands of users who are updating its various versions or reinstalling it each month. That's a lot of money when Valve is ready to handle all that for free. And that's just the bandwidth. Forget all the people involved that have to get the files updated, test the updates, handle customer issues, etc.
I have it installed and everything! I'll play it someday.