Fraudster MB Publishing has uploaded 2007's BlackSite: Area 51 onto Steam, privately confessing that it's been done without the permission of the game's current rights holders at Warner Brothers. BlackSite: Area 51 is a first-person shooter originally released by Midway on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It's the second game in a franchise reboot of Area 51, the company's classic arcade rails shooter series. The game follows the formulas of the time, including a Call of Duty-style single-player campaign and a basic deathmatch multiplayer suite. The game did come out on PC at the time of release, but it did not release on Steam, a platform that was in its relative infancy at the time.
Steam has had its fair share of older games joining its library as of late, making the emergence of Blacksite: Area 51 not surprising at first glance. EA recently ported over most of this generation's releases to the platform, joining forces with Valve in the face of increased competition from Epic Games. Microsoft also extended their releases to the Steam marketplace, creating store pages for high profile Xbox Series X titles like Halo Infinite and Psychonauts 2. While WB Games hasn't posted The Grid or NBA Ballers to the service, it's plausible that a decade-old shooter could appear to cash in on fan nostalgia.
However, thanks to a report by Steam watchdog group Sentinels of the Store, it's evident that WB Games is not behind the listing for Blacksite: Area 51. Instead, it was MB Publishing, a company seemingly owned and operated by Steam user Lamuento. Answering questions about the release on the game's community forums, Lamuento states that they purchased the rights to publish the game. In a conversation from Discord, Lamuento contradicts that claim, stating instead that they know WB will DMCA the illegally uploaded game and that they hope it happens after release so they can make a "ton of money" off of duped Steam customers.
This kind of activity is pretty unprecedented when it comes to Steam. The only thing that may come close is an incident many years ago when a spiritual successor to Rockstar's Rock 'N Roll Racing called Motor Rock shipped with the same announcer vocals as the SNES game. The game was on sale for a week before a forced delisting, but there were a lot fewer games coming out on Steam back in the halcyon days of 2013. In 2020, Steam's new releases are always a deluge, so it sadly would be easy for a reupload like this to slip through unnoticed.
Steam has undoubtedly improved by leaps and bounds when compared to a couple of years ago. The number of less than desirable game-like products is still high, but the store has shifted to a state where they're much less likely to get attention. In the case of MB Publishing and their listing of BlackSite: Area 51, it works to their advantage, since gamers looking for the PC release may find it and buy it without realizing its illegal origins. One might hope that Valve would be able to stop these types of listings before they hit the web, but hopefully, someone can stop the page from going live before it's too late.
