If you look into the HumbleBundle they have several ways of distribution, most of the games are just tar.gz and some also support .deb and .rpm. The minor have .bin or just a great .sh file. I would prefer the tar.gz file, but i'm also fine with .bin/.sh.
I guess it's no big deal to offer more ways, and i think desura is nice, but i prefer not to depend on a plattform so i would love .tar.gz as i can use it on my primary workstation with Gentoo (hey a ebuild would be awesome and also with LFS and Slackware.
I hope they will use the beta time to deal with this issues, so we can help them.