Hi everyone!
We want to give you the opportunity to play on servers hosted by us in the future, both official servers (no mods) and your own servers that can have mods. To make this possible, we need money, in other words, a monthly subscription or hosting fee, whatever you like to call it. You will still be able to host your own game server on your PC or a third-party server as well as play in singleplayer.
Although it will take some time until we have set up everything to support official servers and server hosting, we need to consider the costs for that already. Unfortunately, this means we can't sell the game on Steam anymore because Valve would get a significant revenue share when you subscribe to our service. We have to set up our own infrastructure, which is a huge investment, so it is not affordable for us to pay a large chunk of our income to Valve because we want to offer this service as inexpensive as possible (for significantly less than most paid MMOs).
We think that this step will be beneficial for the game because we can spend more money on the development by not paying xx% to Valve. While we get traffic on Steam that apparently should make the cut worth it, it's actually not that much and we will have to do a lot of marketing anyway.
There are more reasons why we will leave Steam, but I don't want to talk about them here.
If you have purchased the game on Steam, you will keep it and still get all updates via our launcher.
If you want to purchase our game after its removal from Steam, it will be available on our website next year (2019), as soon as the next big update is out.
Update: We have requested Valve to remove it after the Winter sale.