Generally people fall into three categories when it comes to piracy;
- Have no interest in supporting the game financially prior, play the game, it's not to their taste, so they don't support it.
- Have no interest in supporting the game financially prior, play the game, enjoy it lots, but they don't support it anyways or they're waiting for a final release.
- Have no interest in supporting the game financially prior, play the game, enjoy it lots, end up supporting it.
Situations 1 and 2 are no loss to us, because they wouldn't have supported it anyways, and situation #3 just means we gained another pledge/supporter thanks to piracy. It's a complete win/win for us.
There's one more remaining situation, in that someone is interested in your game PRIOR to playing it, but then they pirate it and they feel it's not deserving of your money, and that's mainly on you, as the developer, to make your game better so that situations of that nature are few and far between. If someone's initially interested from your screenshots, description, and videos or animations, and you still lose their interest after trying it out, then that's definitely on you, the dev.
So going from that, our general thoughts with piracy are;
- There's no point in fighting it, because it's unwinnable and just a huge waste of effort/time especially if we were to do it for every monthly demo
- Some people are in parts of the world or in situations where they simply can't use Patreon to get the latest build, and we want as many people as possible to be able to enjoy our games (legally, of course, we don't want anyone underage or getting arrested for playing them due to their country's laws!
- Piracy is a neutral or a win situation for us for the monthly demos, exceptionally rarely is it a loss
That said, we would like to ask that when the full version's out, people do hold off on pirating it at least for a month or so, because that's when the majority of sales are made, and while we're not trying to be greedy, we do want to continue to make games of this nature and quality and to do that we need a lot of money to afford said assets and to keep us going.