Neat. 30 seconds into the game and it accuses me of piracy. Small glitch there?
I'm slightly concerned it may just have been a misunderstanding, when someone else told them they need to activate their Steam key for Itch's DRM to work they responded "See the author's reply" you didn't seem to have replied anything related to that, so I wonder if they misunderstood what I said, which was "It's a joke, because the game is about piracy...", not referring to the message, but to my earlier message saying "Sounds right." when they mentioned the message, and somehow they mistook me for the author and mistook my message for the message itself being an intentional joke?
Could well be wrong, but the situation just seems off and I'd hate for this to have been a genuine innocent misunderstanding.
You have to redeem the Steam key in order for it to authenticate your ownership of the game. Even if you're not using the Steam version. "The Itch.io version of the game has custom DRM that requires that you own the game on Steam. It is non-intrusive and simply verifies ownership of the game. Please redeem your Steam key before playing." Perhaps that could've been included in the piracy message though.