Dbrand's Steam Machine Companion Cube case is dead — it never had Valve's permission

Dbrand has canceled its Companion Cube enclosure for the Steam Machine and pulled all trace of it from YouTube, Reddit, and its own website. The reason is straightforward: the company built and sold the product without ever securing a license from Valve, whose intellectual property the Companion Cube design is.

Dbrand posted a full explanation on its subreddit on Monday. The company first teased the concept on November 12, 2025 — the same day Valve announced the Steam Machine — and over 15,000 people signed up for notifications within the first day. Rather than approach Valve for a license at that point, Dbrand just built the thing. More than a thousand engineering hours went in, 44 sets of injection molding tools were developed for the cube's sub-components, the product was redesigned from scratch more than once, and the team even rented out a university campus to film the launch video. Pre-orders went live on June 22 and the Companion Cube became the second-fastest selling product in Dbrand's history. Then Valve's legal team called. Valve was, by Dbrand's own account, "direct, fair, and respectful" — but it told Dbrand to stop selling immediately. Dbrand tried to negotiate a retroactive license entirely on Valve's terms; Valve declined. Everyone who bought one will receive a full refund by end of day. The $129.95 standard version and the $99 "Poverty Cube" variant are both gone. Dbrand noted it was already losing money on every Poverty Cube sold by the time the project ended.

The Steam Machine is Valve's first dedicated gaming PC hardware in years, and the Portal franchise — home of the Companion Cube — is one of the most beloved in PC gaming. The fit between the two was so obvious that the idea went viral the moment Dbrand floated it. That's also what makes the outcome sting: Dbrand had a genuinely popular product on its hands and torched it through a basic IP oversight. PC Gamer has reached out to Valve to ask whether the company has its own Companion Cube case in the works, which would explain why it refused to grant Dbrand a second chance — though Valve has not commented publicly.

Dbrand was unusually candid in its post-mortem, explicitly stating "Valve didn't do anything wrong here" and calling the rejection "a fair answer" given the backwards approach of building first and asking later. "We made something a lot of people were excited about, then incinerated our shot at bringing it to market," the company wrote. "It's a hard lesson to learn publicly." Whether Valve ever produces an official Companion Cube case itself remains the one open question fans are holding onto.