"We'll regret this for a long time": Valve lawyers forced dbrand to remove Portal cube-style Steam Machine case from sale

It turns out that producing products based on someone else's franchise without a license is not a very reliable business strategy.

Recently, the well-known accessory manufacturer dbrand removed mentions of a stylish case for the Steam Machine from its website. It was designed in the style of the cube from the Portal puzzle franchise.

Now it has become known what happened. A dbrand representative explained that the "Companion Cube" case was made without a Valve license.

Last year, on the day the Steam Machine was announced, dbrand presented a concept for this case, and the publication went viral online. Subsequently, it turned into a full-fledged product, but no one during that time even tried to contact Valve and ask if it was even possible to do so:

We will regret this decision for a very long time. Over the next seven months, we poured our hearts into this project. More than a thousand hours went into engineering development by our industrial design team. Forty-four sets of injection molds were created – one for each component of the cube. The entire product was redesigned from scratch more than once to perfectly fit how it holds the device. We rented a university campus for the release video shoot. In the end, we were losing money on every $99 Poverty Cube sold, but that no longer mattered. The project became a passion project for the entire company. Unfortunately, pride in the product we created does not give us the right to create it.

Lawyers contacted dbrand and explained that the Companion Cube is Valve's intellectual property, for which dbrand does not have a license. They demanded the immediate removal of the product and the video about it. The project will not return – Valve refused to grant a license:

We asked Valve if there was any way to keep the project: with an official license, with their approval, on their terms. They refused. Given our "make first, ask later" approach, this was a fair response.