Valve has silenced an attempt to create a ‘Companion Cube’ skin for the Steam Machine, shutting down appeals and refusing to give any blessing for a third-party company to create it moving forward. This axes an attempt by dbrand to honor the arrival of the Steam Machine by creating a beloved Portal-themed throwback skin for it.
The problem was that dbrand never sought permission to create the skin, and when it launched, Valve’s legal team spread across the product like wildfire, killing it in no time. Despite dbrand’s appeals, Valve refused to relent, standing firm and expressly forbidding the company to create the skin.
Companion Cube Skin for Steam Machine Eliminated
Dbrand revealed that when the Companion Cube ‘wrap’ launched for the Steam Machine on June 22nd, it became the second-fastest-selling product they’d ever created, and that it had arrived after months of painstaking development and iteration.
In a post on social media, the team explained:
We poured our souls into this project. More than a thousand hours went into engineering from our industrial design team. Forty-four 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.
Now, every customer who purchased a Companion Cube will get a refund.
Responding to Valve’s legal issues, dbrand immediately ‘eviscerated’ the entire presence of the Companion Cube from the internet, incinerating all traces of it to avoid further ramifications.
Ultimately, the team admitted that Valve had done nothing wrong by closing down the skin; it was more dbrand’s fault for not ‘asking first’ if they could create the Companion Cube.
Would you have bought the warp for the Steam Machine if it had been allowed to stay on the market? Let us know your thoughts on the Insider Gaming Discord server.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
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