Accessory maker dbrand has pulled its Steam Machine Companion Cube and is refunding everyone who bought one, after Valve told the company it had built the enclosure around Portal intellectual property without a license. The product and its launch video were scrubbed from dbrand’s website, YouTube, and social channels last week, and dbrand says every buyer is being refunded, with anything still outstanding cleared by the end of the week.
The Companion Cube started as a concept render with a sign-up page dbrand posted on November 12, the day Valve announced the Steam Machine. More than 15,000 people signed up in the first day, and dbrand spent the next seven months turning it into a real product without ever clearing it with Valve. The company says it logged over 1,000 engineering hours, built 44 sets of injection molding tools, rented out a university campus to film the launch video, and was losing money on every Poverty Cube it sold.
The result was an enclosure, not just a skin, that wraps Valve’s $1,049-and-up Steam Machine in the look of Portal’s Companion Cube. It sold in a $129.95 Companion Cube edition with collectible extras and a stripped-down $99.95 Poverty Cube, and after launching early on Monday, June 22, it became the second-fastest-selling product in dbrand’s 15-year history, behind only its Switch 2 Killswitch case.
Shortly after launch, Valve’s legal team contacted dbrand to say the Companion Cube is Valve’s intellectual property, which dbrand had no license to use, and asked for the product and its launch film to come down. The company complied, then appealed for a chance to keep the project alive under an official license, which Valve declined. In its statement, dbrand took full responsibility, said Valve was within its rights and handled the matter fairly, and summed it up in its own words: “We should’ve asked first.”
