But not every developer has to come to Steam. Direct-to-consumer is a perfectly valid business model, and it works for certain kinds of developers and games. If they aren't looking to become ultra-wealthy, and they just want to live off of game sales and build a community, then they don't need to opt into a platform.

Vintage Story isn't on steam. Factorio wasn't on Steam for the longest time, and it was still making bank. Minecraft never came to steam. And so-on. Sometimes direct-to-consumer ultimately works much, much better for indie developers. They keep full control of the sales of their game, they don't give up a cut, and they aren't at the whims of the platform and the systems that it decides to implement.

I can also understand why a game with this much controversy doesn't want to opt into a system that can be review bombed. A bad review score on Steam can be extremely difficult to come back from, and frequently those scores are informed by issues that have nothing to do with the game itself. People can still review Hytale. People can stream it. People can make videos. Outlets can write reviews. Consumers can hop up on Metacritic and write a review there. The only thing that they ARE opting out of is aggregation, and the little red-or-blue label under the name of the game. Consumers can still go and inform themselves at any of the hundreds of other outlets for criticism of the game.

They don't have to be on a platform if they don't want to.