WHAT JUST HAPPENED? Dbrand, the peripheral company that loves controversy, has found itself in trouble again. This time, it's over the Steam Machine Companion Cube. While the $99 Portal 2-inspired case certainly looked impressive, the fact that Dbrand never asked for permission to use the IP led to a legal threat from Valve. As a result, the case is now canceled and buyers are being refunded.
Dbrand admitted in a post that it never asked for a license from Valve to make the Companion Cube, a decision it expects to regret for a long time.
The company says that thousands of hours of work went into creating, engineering, and building the enclosure. Forty-four sets of injection molding tools were developed, one for each of the cube's subcomponents. The entire product was redesigned from scratch more than once, just to get the way it cradles the console exactly right. Debrand was even willing to take a loss on every $99 cube sold as the product had become a passion project for the organization.
"Unfortunately, being proud of the thing we made did not give us the right to make it," Dbrand wrote.
When it launched on June 22, the cube became Dbrand's second-fastest-selling product ever – only the Switch 2 Killswitch case outperformed it. Unfortunately, that's when Valve's legal team made contact.
