There have been a lot of questions regarding whats happening with Steam. We are not going on the Steam store. It will not be possible to purchase Project Zomboid on Steam for the foreseeable future, and no agreement has been made to do so in the future. Wed love to be on the Steam store, for obvious reasons. But were a bit early on for that kinda thing.
Instead they are letting us use their servers, their library, their update system, their DRM (no more logon boxes!) but we will not appear in any form on the store and the game will only be able to appear on your Steam library via redeem codes.
So to go through each issue thats been raised in comments / tweets / forum posts:
1) When we are on Steam (just as in using their servers and DRM and library via redeem codes) we plan to allow you to transfer from Desura to Steam. The details of how this will take place are not clear at the moment, but there is nothing stopping us from being able to do this.
2) If youre waiting to purchase the game until its on Steam, you could be looking at a year, perhaps more. Perhaps itll never be on the Steam store. We just dont know. Id like to think we will be, though.
3) Now the update is out (barring a few fixes and optimizations that need sorting when our brains work again) we can go full gear into getting onto Steam. There are a few things we need to do, a bit of PHP programming and whatnot to handle the codes, that we just couldnt find the time to do while working on the update. So hopefully well have Steam support very soon. However you wont be able to buy any other way but Desura and Google Checkout for a good while, and both these paths can lead to Steam codes, so if you want the game, dont let waiting for that stop you.
4) I should add for clarity, that you dont actually need to go to Desura to ultimately get a Steam code, though the benefits of using Desura (like having auto-updating) that youre after in Steam in the first place should be the reasons you decide to use it (also, to be honest, it makes our lives 1000x easier and Scott has done some awesome things for our game and other alphadonationware indie titles with the service). The route from Desura to Steam is through our own user database. Desura will offer a way for you to register on our servers and get a PZ username / password to your e-mail, and its once youre in our database well be able to assign you a Steam code.
Obviously its up to you where you purchase from, but we will say that if youre easy either way, going with Desura is our preferred choice. Firstly we feel they more than deserve their cut and our support for being so accommodating to our game on their service, secondly they cut down severely on the amount of administrative stuff we need to deal with and thirdly, its a lot easier to update the version there and lastly it keeps us once removed from the terrors of online merchants
Obviously at the moment Linux and Mac users are not able to use it, but once were on Steam and Desura releases on Linux, we should have a distribution platform for each and every platform.
Thank you!
Indie Stone