Valve is selling pirated games now.
Update: The game has been delisted.
Original Story: Every now and then we find a new low that some developer stoops to in selling games that they didn’t make on Steam. Forget wholesale repackaging and resale of pre-made games from the Unity/Unreal store, one developer is just straight up pirating a commercial video game. And Valve has so far allowed it!
The game is Blacksite Area 51, a game that originally released back in 2007 on PC and consoles. Blacksite Area 51 is listed on Steam under the developer Midway Games and publisher MB Publishing. Just two problems; Midway Games went bankrupt in 2010 and MB Publishing isn’t a real company. At least not in this context.
In reality this pirated game is being sold by some fraudster based out of Lithuania assuming the Steam profile doesn’t contain fake information. The person is claiming with no evidence that the game was legally licensed out, as though Warner Bros. would license out a relaunch to some solo project in the Baltics working out of his mother’s garage.
“Okay, just because you can get an old game from a piracy site does not mean anything, midway studios closed down and assets were sold out, we made a deal with the current asset holder to begin selling the game on steam.”
But the story gets better, as it always does. Our friends over at the Sentinels of the Store managed to get their hands on messages from this Lithuanian dude admitting that the whole thing is a scam. The purpose, not that you needed to be told, is to make as much money as possible and run with it before WB hits the game with a copyright strike. I’m not sure how much this guy expects to make on a thirteen year old game that didn’t do much to stave off Midway’s bankruptcy in 2010.
There is the possibility for a happy ending here. Valve is a lot more lenient when it comes to approving store pages than they are for approving game releases, and just because the store was approved does not automatically mean that this is going to go up for sale. We’ve seen a few titles in the past that were clearly full of copyrighted material that Valve refused to approve for launch despite the store pages getting approval.
Hopefully the mass of voices shouting out about this game mean that Valve will figure out that this dude is not actually Midway Games. Hopefully. Otherwise the legal department from Warner Bros. is going to come in like a wrecking ball, as the philosopher Miley Cyrus once wrote.
MMO Fallout 