They're barely fighting against piracy. They are, in fact, doing the bare minimum a developer would be expected to do. Filing DMCA takedown on links and implementing basic DRM tied to the crowdfunding services. It is absolutely incomparable to something like Denuvo or going full ubisoft always-online, and certainly doesn't compare to a renpy developer using daz3d and prefab models and code.
What has Team Carnal done?
- Worked on a game for approaching a year, much of that time with a negative budget.
- Paid for the project out of their own pockets when it wasn't making money.
- Created an interesting world, from-scratch, that is still ongoing in development.
- Been as open about development as they reasonably could be, including posting here both now and in the past. (Patreon forces adult content to be paywalled, thus their update logs not being public. They're also putting info onto a wiki now.)
- Continued work on the project despite financial and community backlash.
- Implemented basic DRM to protect their investments.
- Put their long term livelihoods (including their ability to support their families) at risk by stepping out of the normal game development industry to work on an AO title.
What have we, F95, done as a community?
- Immediately accused the developers of stealing assets from AAA games.
- Made a longstanding habit of creating public upload links for a paid product as soon as possible, even when that product had a negative budget. (Notably, F95 has fairly good SEO due to having existed for quite a while, so this forum's pages can easily eclipse the official pages of a new developer in searches.)
- Insulted the abilities of the developers for quite a lot of reasons, varying from the art to the code to the world itself.
- Insulted and demeaned the project for not having specific features people wanted, often when those features are explicitly planned by the developer and in their easy to access, publicly available roadmap.
- Reacted to the basic, entirely reasonable DRM the developers put in place to help protect the project from literally going under with insults, moralistic assumptions, and accusations that they have no plans to actually develop a finished product.
- Treated an early alpha project with core mechanics still being developed as though it was nearly finished and just devoid of content. (Seriously, this game has a lot of "only one of this exists" because they're developing mechanics and will, once everything is ready, scale it outward to full content scope.)
So overall you might see why the developers aren't on the best of terms with this forum.