Hey there! Glad you enjoyed the game, means a lot to me!
Thanks a lot for the interest, but right now I think paying for the game through itch.io is the only way to support us. That said, right now I don't think the game really has enough content to justify a price tag, so feel free to keep playing for free every now and then.
One day we do hope to release a commercial version though! Just not sure how long it will take haha
Also, feel free to tell your gamedev friends what happened. What you presumed is correct. Here are things that helped me a ton, I hope you don't mind me listing them:
- If you have open source games, be mindful of their license. Using GPL is a good idea IMO, since Steam explicitly does not recommend it. You'll still be the owner of the project, so you'll be able to publish it on Steam, but other people won't.
Also, of course, I'm not a lawyer, so don't quote me on this 🙃 - Every now and then look from where your game views are coming from. For Pigeon Ascent, I saw an unusual spike coming from twitter. This helped me find a tweet talking about the game, which lead me to check Steam.db for more information, and then I figured out what was going on.
- Finally, submitting a DMCA report to Steam seems to work pretty well. Just follow their guidelines and soon enough they should take the game out.
Thanks again for playing! If I can answer anything else, feel free to ask