Ioticus, sorry about that. The beta was never supposed to be downloadable from Desura. I screwed up some date configuration on Desura, it is hard to figure out what everything does there. I have not been able to set up downloads for myself and beta testers either yet, so you're the first one to have downloaded it from Desura. But I hope I will learn how it works soon, in the meantime you can try out the beta as a bonus for preordering at exactly the right time
And the crashes was a bit unlucky with that one version, usually the betas are fully stable.