How Does a Company Even Make This Mistake

[00:00] I've been keeping up quite closely with everything going on in the gaming space over the last couple weeks. Obviously, I've been yapping about it a lot. I can't stop blabbering about it, really, because it has just been awful news out the wazoo every single day. It's a septic tank explosion

[00:19] that I can't look away from. And while I sit here just wide-eyed, like someone who just saw boobies for the first time, I'm now also seeing things like adjacent to the AAA gaming space,

[00:32] following victim to the orb of confusion. Debrand, an extremely popular company that specializes in customizable cases and skins for devices, has now just made a bafflingly,

[00:46] awful admittance here about their highly anticipated companion cube product, which was supposed to be a case for the steam machine. Well, it turns out they never even had permission to make that.

[01:00] They never had a license. They even spent thousands upon thousands of clams to put this in front of everyone's peepers. They sponsored Linus Tech Tips here in this video as an integration for him to show this off and promote the companion cube from Debrand. But meanwhile, they never even had

[01:15] a license for it. So they went straight to like marketing it, doing a huge marketing spend thousands of de bloons to develop it, obviously thousands of hours to make it as well to manufacture it. But they

[01:27] skipped step one of getting a license, getting permission to do it. How is that possible? That is deep-brained dead. Now, I'm not the biggest consumer of this kind of product. I don't buy customized skins and protective devices or anything like that, but I am familiar with Debrand. They are a huge

[01:43] corporation. They're a big company. I'm most familiar with them because of everything that happened with them versus Kastify with the plagiarism stuff. That was some wacky shit. I don't know if Kastify still exists. I don't know how they could after how embarrassingly cringed that was back then.

[01:58] But that's like the main thing I remember about Debrand. I don't really keep up with their products. But after seeing this, I decided to look into it to see if they'd normally get permission and stuff. And while I can't see if they always do, it seems like they love to tip toe on the line

[02:12] of legality. Even back in, I think it was 2021, they had a legal spat with Sony about their dark face plates. Debrand was doing where they even egged on Sony to sue them. And Sony eventually did

[02:26] season to assist them from what I can tell them. They stopped. So Sony said, all right, bet when big dogdom. And it seems like that's part of Debrand's image is that they're kind of like the bad boys. And this is, I guess, just another marketing tactic from them to get their name out

[02:41] there. Like, oh, we're getting sued by these companies, which I guess it's effective. It does get the brand's name out there. And they are very successful. I don't really get the point though to be honest, like especially in the case with companion queue, because they spent so much money

[02:57] doing this and never had the license or permission. And no one can really rally behind that and support them. Like, you know, pumping their fists for the little guy against valve that's trying to bully them unjustly. Like they even openly admit, yeah, we just never asked. We just never got permission.

[03:12] Like how do you like you can't defend that? You can't like be on Debrand side. All you did was waste not only all your time and resources and the time of your employees, but you also wasted the time of all the people that put in the pre-order and shit. Now, it does seem all of them are getting

[03:27] a refund. So that's great. But like, what the fuck was the point in this whole charade, this hoot nanny? I find it hard to believe that they just didn't think to get a license or ask for permission. But anyway, let's take a look at their statement. And as you've probably noticed, the

[03:42] steam machine companion cube was eviscerated from our website, YouTube and other social media platforms last week. The blunt version is that we made the companion cube without a license from valve. Everyone who purchased a companion cube will have their refund issued by end of day. Everything

[03:55] else beyond this is just detail. If you want the full story, keep reading. I want the full scoop, on Nov. 12, 2025, the day the steam machine was announced, we put up a concept render and sign up page to see if anyone would be interested in a companion cube enclosure. When moderately viral,

[04:11] with over 15,000 people signing up to be notified in the first day. In the months that followed, we built the idea into something real without ever asking valve if we could. Why, though? Like, why would you do that? So like, it's fine to put up like that render and get interest. Hey, how would you

[04:26] guys feel if we did pursue this? But then why wouldn't the next step be like, okay, there's cleared demand here. You guys are hungry. You got some grumbly bellies and you need a companion cube in there. Go it. Don't shut. Okay. We'll ask valve if we can. Like, well, I don't know how being a business

[04:39] of D brand size that wouldn't cross your mind. I believe that they did this knowing full well that they were playing with fire and that if they did get shut down, it would only be good for them as like no publicity is bad publicity and that this would be something people would be supportive of. Like,

[04:54] hey, D brand fought the good fight. It didn't work out, but we're real D brand die hard loyalists now because they really went for it with the companion cube. I'm not even seeing that response from fucking anyone, even the biggest fans of D brand. Everyone's calling this stupid because

[05:08] it doesn't even make sense. Like, it is actually going out of your way to be an imbecile, to not ask the company whom you're using their IP if you have if you can do that. Like, you need to get the license. Like, that's the most basic shit ever. Everyone knows. We're going to regret that decision

[05:23] for a very long time. Over the next seven months, we poured our souls into this project more than a thousand hours went into engineering from our industrial design team. 44 sets of injection molding tools were developed. One for each of the cube sub components, the entire product was redesigned

[05:38] from scratch more than once just to get it just to get the way it cradled 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 dollar poverty cube sold, but it didn't matter. This had turned into a passion

[05:54] project for the entire organization. So you went through all of this and never once thought maybe we should ask. Maybe we should at least be safe and see if Valve's going to be okay with it. Let's try and get a license here. Somehow you've BLJ, backward long jumped through the first step here,

[06:12] completely forgetting to ask about the license. And now you're trying to film a launch video, renting out a university campus for it. Probably fucking directed by Christopher Nolan or something. And still, no one pipes up and says, guys, should we ask permission to do this? We still never got

[06:30] the thumbs up from Valve, the green light. Thoughts? Thoughts? Unfortunately, being proud of the thing we made did not give us the right to make it. We launched around 3am on Monday, June 22nd. Over night, it became the second fastest selling product in our 15 year history behind only the Switch 2 kill switch.

[06:46] Shortly after Valve's legal team reached out, they stated that the companion cube is Valve intellectual property for which Debrand does not have a license. They requested we take down the product in launch film immediately. This was entirely within their rights and they were direct, fair and

[06:59] respectful throughout. We took everything down and made an appeal. We asked Valve whether there was any way to keep the project alive properly licensed with their blessing on their terms. They said no. Given our backwards approach of building first, asking permission later, it was a fair answer.

[07:15] That's basically the whole story. We made something a lot of people were excited about, then incinerated our shot at bringing it to the market to hard less than to learn publicly. But, you've actually got me malfunctioning. How is that a lesson you needed to learn at all?

[07:29] Everyone already knows that. That's like basic, common sense. Even if you've never been in business or anything, just boiling it down to the bare bones here. If you're going to make something based on someone else's work and sell it for yourself, don't you think naturally your brand would go,

[07:46] maybe I should ask the people that own that if they'd be okay with it. Even if you know nothing about licensing or whatever, that's the most basic following the breadcrumbs of thoughts imaginable. It feels deliberate. It feels like they didn't want to ask for a license because they knew it might

[08:02] be a slow process, which means they would be late to the steam machine market. They'd be late to the launch. So in order to be there on time right away to capitalize off the hype train, they felt that they needed to immediately go on production and didn't have time to deal with that pesky license, so

[08:18] they crossed their fingers and hoped for the best. That's what it feels like to me if this isn't just another one I like they're marketing things, but it's still such a stupid gamble. Like it's still dumb. It goes without saying, but we'll say it regardless. Valve didn't do anything wrong here. They

[08:30] built a game franchise a lot of people love and they alone get to decide how to use it. To everyone who was as excited about this project as we were, thank you and sorry. Refunds are being issued today if it hasn't landed in your account by end of week, you know how to reach us. To Valve, thank you

[08:44] for portal. Sorry for the headache. We should ask first. I can at least appreciate that they're not trying to fling shit at Valve for this or paint them as the bad guys for stepping in. That was big of them because I thought when I initially read the headlines that they'd try and like fight back like

[08:59] no, why is Valve doing this? They're stopping all over us. This is absurd. But they are outright saying yeah, Valve didn't do anything wrong. We're dumb. I still find it just so hard to believe that they wouldn't have even toyed with the idea of trying to get permission from Valve or get a license. So I

[09:15] still believe it's one of two things. A, a calculated marketing tactic here where they were willing to roll the dice and if it did go tits up as it inevitably did, that they thought this would be good publicity

[09:27] regardless for the D brand image and it fits in line with how they've conducted it in the past like with Sony as it appears. So maybe it could have been like a marketing thing which again, I don't think was smart anyway because you devoted so much time and resources to this with so many thousands

[09:43] of signups. I like all you do is just lose money on that. I don't think it does anything for your brand image and it just paints you as dumb for it. Or it could be that they knew that if they tried to

[09:56] go through the proper channels of getting the licensing first for the companion cube in order to use the portal license to make the companion cube, they thought it would take too long and they'd missed this golden opportunity, this window to be there right away for the steam machine for the steam machine

[10:10] users and have this companion cube ready off rip. So just being early, they didn't, they didn't want to take the chance of being too late. So they decided fuck it. We won't even bother with the permission of the license. We'll just hope they're cool with it and it didn't work out. Both of these though

[10:25] are not smart. They're both dumb. And I can't decide what's worse if they made just a bad business decision of knowingly just not getting the license or if this is a company run by individuals who never

[10:38] even think to get permission first. It never crosses their mind like ah we're so dizzy and we just got so excited we dove right into the companion cube started making it going to marketing pushing it running out of university campus and would you believe it not a single one of us even thought to

[10:52] contact valve about a license. Ain't that the darnest thing? Like I don't know what's worse if they're like run by people that are that absent-minded or if they just made such a stupid decision about like knowingly avoiding the license and hoping for the best. Either way crazy fucking decision

[11:09] here from D brand as a company. This was a wacky little thing to be learning about. Anyway that's about it. Yeah.