Hey!
There’s been confusion recently about how we intend to distribute the beta, and I’d like to clear some of that up.
An important thing to note off the bat is that we do still fully intend to provide customers with a DRM-free non-Steam version of the game! We know how important that is to some of you, who either don’t like or can’t use Steam for one reason or another.

However, the way we’ve decided to go about the beta has left us wondering how best to go about distributing it in its first stages, considering how frequently it’s going to be updated and patched and how much simpler it is to do that via Steam. Hence Tiy’s recent tweets! These are our options:

1) Provide a Steam key and DRM-free direct download from the start, and keep them both up to date! This…isn’t the most attractive option. We’d spend far too much of time trying to manage our updates instead of making the game, and as a result updates would have to be slower/less frequent for everyone.
2) Provide a Steam key and DRM-free direct download from the start, but update the DRM-free version less frequently. This could work, but the DRM-free version of the game would be incompatible with the Steam version most of the time, which isn’t so great.
3) Provide a Steam key from the start and provide a DRM-free version a little later when the beta is more stable and updates are less frequent. Considering that the ‘Progenitor’ stage of beta is very much intended to be a testing period, a lot of people may want to wait to play when it’s more stable, anyway.

So that’s where we’re at! We don’t gain anything by excluding anyone, so we’re really just trying to figure out how to do what’s best.
Wouldn’t mind hearing your thoughts, guys!