***A little intro.*** We're an indie studio consisting of 5 members. Recently, we've released our first-ever game on Steam and were really excited to do so after working on it for almost 2 years. However, despite all the 'marketing' we've done, it just didn't get enough traction. Around 2k wishlists, but only 300 people have bought it. There were definitely issues with the game that we had in the beginning: bugs, not enough content, etc. But that all got fixed in the first month. We had a couple of streamers play our game even before the fixes and they loved it. They gave us valuable feedback that we've considered and worked with. We were fully aware that our first game will not be a 100% success, so we were ready for low numbers. However... ***The problem.*** After researching for a hot minute, we realised that our game was pirated on several websites. We haven't looked at a lot, but some of the major and most popular sites had it on them. There were approximately 4k downloads in total from those websites only. I've read in another post that some cope with the situation by acknowledging the fact that if it was a bad game it would't have been pirated. I'm sorry, but it's quite hard to believe that when even the most scuffed indie projects get pirated sometimes. I guess the question I'm really asking is, in case the statement above is true and our game really is not bad to be pirated 4k times, how do we go about this in the future? I know piracy will always exist and there's no way to actually fight it, but maybe there are ways to mitigate the damage it can do to a small indie studio that's just trying to get themselves on the market? I'm sure there are successful indie devs out here in this subreddit, so if see our post, please give us some advice if that's okay to ask. Thank you all in advance! And sorry for the long text. *\*Side note: Our game costs $9.99, but I feel like that's fair for a 2 year production time and a complete singleplayer experience.\**