Another Companion Cube ends up in the Incinerator

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Another Companion Cube ends up in the Incinerator

dbrand creates the Companion Cube. dbrand sold the Companion Cube. dbrand did not ask Valve if it was allowed to build or sell the Companion Cube. As of this week, the Steam Machine Companion Cube wrap is dead, all orders have been restored, and the whole saga is now an interesting tale of how to lose a passion project to your own enthusiasm.

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The short version, straight from dbrand’s own statement: “We made the Companion Cube without a license from Valve. Everyone who bought the Companion Cube will get their money back at the end of the day.” Everything else is just the details of how it got there.

How This Really Started

Back on November 12, 2025, the day Valve announced the Steam machine, dbrand put up a giveaway idea and a sign-up page just to drum up interest. It went very well – over fifteen thousand people signed up for the newsletter on the first day. From there, instead of taking that as market research and reaching out to Valve, dbrand just keeps building. “In the months that followed, we built the idea into a reality without asking Valve if we could,” the company admitted. “We will regret that decision for a long time.”

They were not wrong.

Over the next seven months, dbrand’s industrial design team poured more than a thousand hours into the project. Forty-four different sets of injection molding tools were made, one for each small part of the cube. The entire enclosure was redesigned from scratch multiple times just to focus on how it held the actual console. They rented a university campus to film the presentation video. By dbrand’s own admission, they were losing money on every $99 unit sold – this had become a passion project for the entire company, with profit margins to be discarded.

Launch, and Fall

The Companion Cube launched at three in the morning on Monday, June 22, a few hours before Valve’s official Steam machine pricing and launch details dropped. It became the second fastest selling product in dbrand’s fifteen year history, behind only the Switch 2 Killswitch. Pressure units are out. Sales were strong enough that some of those review samples have now, ironically, become genuine collectors’ items – a Portal-branded resource that should never have legally existed in the first place.

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Then Valve’s legal team called. They confirmed that the Companion Cube is Valve intellectual property, that dbrand does not have a license for it, and requested that the product and film be released immediately. dbrand, to their credit, doesn’t have one bad word to say about how that conversation went. “This was completely within their rights, and they were direct, impartial, and respectful throughout,” the company said. They appealed, asking if there was any way to keep the work alive under the proper license, according to Valve’s terms. Valve said no. Given that dbrand built everything backwards – product first, approval never – that’s about as fair an answer as you’d expect.

The Company That Continues to Find This Real Wall

dbrand

This isn’t dbrand’s first rodeo with intellectual property they didn’t own the rights to. Sony previously sent the company to cease and desist with its PS5 skins. The Killswitch Switch 2 case was publicly grilled due to design flaws that caused problems for Joy-Con 2 owners. And dbrand has its own history of controversies that have nothing to do with licensing – the company once had to pay a customer $10,000 after comments about their names were deemed racist. This is a company that, time and time again, has found creative ways to get into the news for reasons other than “they made a cool product.”

What makes the Companion Cube situation a ton different. No power of attorney to fight here, no thinly veiled jab at the company that came knocking. dbrand’s statement reads like genuine, unguarded remorse. “We made something that a lot of people were excited about, then we blew our guns on bringing it to market. It’s a hard lesson to learn publicly,” they wrote, before adding the most important line: “Valve did nothing wrong here. They built a game franchise that many people love and they alone get to decide how it’s used.”

What It Tells Us (and Valve)

The obvious demand for a Companion Cube-style device is clearly there – fifteen thousand registrations in one day, then a near sell-out once it’s launched. Whether Valve ever decides to officially license something like this, or create their own version, is still an open question. The Steam Machine already ships with magnetically adjustable faceplates as a built-in customization option, so the desire to personalize the device is something Valve is at least partially anticipating.

Currently, pre-orders for the Steam machine remain open to anyone who has managed to hack a random reservation, starting at $1,050. Early impressions of the device itself suggest that it doesn’t make a whole lot of financial sense at that price point, which makes losing a smart, well-made $99 device sting a lot more than it would otherwise. dbrand spent seven months and over a thousand developer hours building something truly beautiful. They just didn’t think to ask if they were allowed to sell it. Refunds are currently being processed. Lesson, almost, learned.