That's very strange! I'm at a bit of a loss for what could be causing that behaviour, I've never heard of it happening before. The game doesn't have any Steam integration at all, nor VR functionality, so I'm a little confused as to why SteamVR would be getting involved.
The only thing I can think of that might be related is: were you trying to launch the game from a Steam shortcut?
No, I'm using the Itch Launcher to play my games, the only game i had a similar behavior from before was Tetris Effect launched through the Xbox App, which forcibly opens SteamVR. However,
I also looked through the files of the game trying to fix it on my own, and maybe its because of some default third party binaries in unreal (i could find them under "\Concentric\Engine\Binaries\ThirdParty"). Deleting OpenVR and Oculus leads to the game crashing shortly after Startup, but also SteamVR not opening.
Currently, the only way to prevent this is to entirely uninstall SteamVR, as it opens up even when steam is fully closed and exited out of.
