Its a bit of both.
You can purchase the game on our site, and have your account upgraded and get the "Purchased" badge.
You can then also download the game from our site and play without any limitations.
Many users purchased Starmade on Steam and although Steam does distribute the files to the client computers, WE are not aware of their purchase, and thus they only buy a managed download.
To show the purchase on the dock, and make it recognized by our registry, we need a "one-time" access to look into your Steam account and see you have a purchased copy of Starmade in your Steam library. (Yes its a one time access, we can never reuse the authentication to access your account again, without your explicit permission through the exact same process.)
Now, there is one case left:
You purchased the game on our site, and still want to use it on Steam, and use their (sort of) user friendly managed intallation system.
In this case, the exact same link process is used to add the game to your Steam library.
So the "link" is more a virtual name.
Our site compares our registry to your steam library, and if one of them is upgraded it will make sure both ends are upgraded.
So if you do not trust Steam and/or Valve,
you can easily purchase the game on our site,
and download the launcher
here, to install and update Starmade.
- Andy