Video game accessories manufacturer Dbrand has announced that it will no longer be selling its Companion Cube case for the Steam Machine. Upon the announcement of the Steam Machine last year, Dbrand quickly revealed that it was developing a case for the hardware based on the Companion Cube from the hugely popular game Portal. This past week, Dbrand finally pushed live its orders for the accessory in the wake of Valve announcing the price and release date for the Steam Machine. And while the Companion Cube ended up being one of the most successful products Dbrand had ever created, it now won’t ever end up in the hands of customers.
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In a message shared to Reddit today, Dbrand explained that Valve’s legal team has now barred them from selling or further promoting the Companion Cube. As the IP holder of the Portal franchise, Valve is able to dictate what happens with anything associated with the series. Dbrand said that before it embarked upon creating this Companion Cube case for the Steam Machine, it didn’t ask for Valve’s permission or receive a license to design a product based on Portal. As a result, Valve demanded that Dbrand remove all of its promotional materials for the Companion Cube, despite months of work from the company.
“More than a thousand hours went into engineering from our industrial design team,” said Dbrand of the project. “44 sets of injection molding tools were developed, one for each of the cube’s sub-components. The entire product was redesigned from scratch more than once, just to get the way it cradles the console exactly right. We literally rented out a university campus to film the launch video. By the end, we were losing money on every $99 Poverty Cube sold, but it didn’t matter. This had turned into a passion project for the entire organization. Unfortunately, being proud of the thing we made did not give us the right to make it.”
As for those who already pre-ordered the Companion Cube case for the Steam Machine, Dbrand said that refunds will begin going out this week. It also stressed that Valve did nothing wrong in this situation and that the fault for this ordeal falls entirely on those at Dbrand for not first receiving a license to work on a product tied to Portal.
“We made something a lot of people were excited about, then incinerated our shot at bringing it to market. It’s a hard lesson to learn publicly,” Dbrand continued. “It goes without saying, but we’ll say it regardless: Valve didn’t do anything wrong here. They built a game franchise a lot of people love and they alone get to decide how it’s used. […] To Valve: thank you for Portal, and sorry for the headache. We should’ve asked first.”
All in all, this is a pretty unsurprising situation to see play out, but it’s definitely disappointing, as the Companion Cube was one of the coolest accessories for the Steam Machine that had come about so far. While Dbrand said that it tried to negotiate with Valve to keep this project alive, those within Valve weren’t willing to play ball. Hopefully, Valve will end up changing its mind in the future, as this Companion Cube case feels simply too perfect for the Steam Machine.
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Courtesy of Wizards of the Coast
