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Actually, using a purchased file to test download speed isn’t a common practice—there are built-in tools for that.

I understand that occasional redownloads happen due to internet issues, and if we were talking about 3–5 times, I wouldn’t even question it. But 89 downloads from a single IP? That’s not normal buyer behavior.

I appreciate that you want to defend buyer rights, and believe me, if this were one genuine customer struggling to download, I wouldn’t raise the issue at all. However, as creators, we have to protect our work from abuse because repeated unauthorized sharing means lost sales. If you’re not a creator, you might not fully see why this is a concern, but for us, it’s a serious issue worth investigating.

And to clarify, the downloads stopped because I unpublished the game—not because the buyer suddenly solved their issue.

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I appreciate that you want to defend buyer rights

That is not what I did. I am telling you that you that someone stealing your game is an unlikely explanation.

People pirating games from Itch do not do so by sharing account data or download links to Itch. You need to assume software pirates stupid enough to do so and more, a lot of people dumb enough to download directly from Itch via a pirated link or log in with shared account data.

if this were one genuine customer struggling to download

And you know that it is not so, because.... ? While 89 times is high, but I would manage to do that manually, if I am frustrated that it does not work. Would take about 3 minutes, spread out over an evening. Could even be the Itch App itself, trying to download the file over a faulty line.