1,000 Hours of Work, Zero Permission From Valve

Forty-four sets of injection molding tools. Multiple complete redesigns. A launch video filmed on a rented university campus. Over a thousand hours of industrial design work. And at no point during any of it did anyone at Dbrand apparently think to send Valve an email asking if they could use Valve's intellectual property.

The Canadian accessories company announced on its subreddit today that its Companion Cube enclosure for the Steam Machine has been permanently canceled, with refunds going out to all buyers. The reason is almost comically straightforward: Dbrand built the entire product, from concept to manufacturing tooling to marketing campaign, without ever securing a license from Valve to use the Portal Companion Cube design. "We made the Companion Cube without a license from Valve," the company wrote. "We're going to regret that decision for a very long time."

The timeline makes the whole thing worse. On November 12, 2025, the same day Valve announced the Steam Machine, Dbrand posted a concept render and sign-up page. Over 15,000 people registered for notifications. Months of development followed. Pre-orders opened on June 22, and the product immediately became Dbrand's second-fastest selling launch ever. Then Valve's legal team reached out, stated that the Companion Cube is Valve IP, and asked Dbrand to pull everything. Dbrand complied, then tried to negotiate a proper license after the fact. Valve said no.

The Unforced Error

I keep coming back to the math here. A thousand-plus hours of engineering. Forty-four injection mold toolsets. A product that was losing money on every $99 unit sold. All of that investment, and the single most important step in the entire process, confirming you have the legal right to make the thing, never happened. This isn't a gray area or a borderline fair-use argument. The product was called the Companion Cube. It was covered in Portal iconography. There was never a version of this where Valve wouldn't notice.

Dbrand, to its credit, isn't blaming anyone else. "Valve didn't do anything wrong here," the company wrote. "They built a game franchise a lot of people love and they alone get to decide how it's used." It described Valve's legal team as "direct, fair, and respectful throughout." The company also acknowledged that Valve's refusal to grant a retroactive license was a reasonable response to what Dbrand itself called a "backwards approach of building first and asking permission later."

The product has been scrubbed from Dbrand's website, YouTube channel, and social media. Links to the old store page now redirect to the Reddit post explaining the cancellation. When one Redditor commented, "You guys are fucking stupid, you know that?" Dbrand simply replied, "Yes."

What stings about this, beyond Dbrand's self-inflicted wound, is that the idea was great. The Steam Machine is a cube. The Companion Cube is gaming's most famous cube. The match was so obvious that multiple outlets questioned why Valve itself wasn't selling one. There's a version of this story where Dbrand sends one email in November, gets a license or gets told no before spending a dime, and either ships a legitimate product or walks away with nothing lost. Instead, the company burned through what sounds like a significant chunk of resources on a product that was dead the moment Valve's lawyers opened their inbox. Every hour of that thousand was avoidable.