dbrand's Companion Cube shell is no more.
This morning, dbrand took to social media and reddit to announce that the Companion Cube shell that they were building for Valve's Steam Machine is no more. Citing that Valve had shut down the project when it was revealed that dbrand did not properly license the IP from Valve as they were conceptualizing and building the product.
In a recent reddit post released today, dbrand revealed the following:
We launched around 3am on Monday, June 22nd. Overnight, it became the second-fastest selling product in our 15-year history, behind only the Switch 2 Killswitch.
Shortly after, Valve’s legal team reached out. They stated that the Companion Cube is Valve intellectual property, for which dbrand does not have a license. They requested we take down the product and launch film immediately. This was entirely within their rights, and they were direct, fair, and respectful throughout.
Unfortunately, this means that any orders that were placed by gamers that had already ordered it before they were taken down, which happened at weeks end last week, were refunded this morning. This includes myself, which bums me out because, even though I wasn't getting a Steam Machine right away, I really wanted the shell *just to have **in my possession* mainly because I thought it looked cool.
Regardless, all of the preorders are cancelled if you were one of the few to grab a preorder from the dbrand site when they went live on June 22nd. Let this be a lesson to everyone that wants to do a project and doesn't get the licensing...maybe don't try to make money off of another company's Intellectual Property.
