Tell me your company leadership has ADHD without saying it.
Have they actually worked with Valve before? How could they be dumb enough to not reach out first?
Or was this maybe an attempt to strong-arm Valve into granting them a license? Like, did they expect them to go, “well shit, you’ve got so many preorders now I guess we’ll have to sign off on it”?
Or did they simply expect Valve not to care?
As someone with ADHD this triggers me. They are just dishonest, it doesn’t have anything yo do with ADHD. They have a record.
Just recreate the skin with AI and now it’s Anthropic’s problem.
*taps head
I am not the least bit surprised.
When they first announced it so soon after the Steam Machine was announced, it couldn’t have been more obvious that it’s unlicensed. There’s just no way they could have secured a license from Valve that fast.
After that though, you might think they had plenty of time to reach out and make a deal. And yes, I did half expect them to do this instead of being complete idiots, but judging by the sheer confidence they showed in the original announcement, being complete idiots is also likely.
I am slightly annoyed at Valve for waiting up until the last possible minute to send that C&D, considering they HAD to know about this product right from the start. But I get it. Giving Valve the maximum benefit of the doubt, they could have decided to wait for dbrand to contact them, and they probably already worked up the terms by which they’d license their IP. But as a sort of power play combined with a test of character, they needed dbrand to be the one to make contact first. And they just waited for that to happen, because dbrand HAD to get a license from them, right? Alas, dbrand failed the test of character. Damn.
On brand, honestly. The cake is a lie. Companion cube incinerated. Waiting for Valve to put out a GLaDOS front plate now.
Those rights are yours. They’re only denied to you because of copyright and capitalism.
You have a great idea, you put 5 years into perfecting it and making it the best possible Thing™. You use all the money you have, sell everything you can to get enough funding to start production of your great Thing™.
After 2 month of you selling your Thing™ I see that it is a great product and using my vast fortune I immediately start mass producing it and promote My Thing® to everyone. Due to economy of scale I can produce My Thing© for a quarter of your cost and sell it for half of your price. Everybody buys my cheaper copy and you go bankrupt without having anything to your name, because you invested it all and didn’t pay back your loans yet.
Does that sound fair to you? No? Then you better believe copyright is a boon ( if its not corrupted to hell and back).
This is the typical defence for copyright. It’s also innacurate to the point of being intellectually dishonest. It ignores the reality of capitalism where legal protections only exist for people and corporations that have the money/power to get what they want.
Your Thing™ example would be cloned and sold on Amazon by a broad range of fly-by-night companies, and that’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, Amazon will clone it themselves, obfuscate your product in its search results, and sell your product under their brand, sometimes even for more than you’re selling it.
If your Thing™ isnt a physical product but rather something creative, then 99 times out of 100, there are only really two paths available to you:
In the lucky case you sell your copyright to a third party that exploits it (and you), offering you a pittance while simultaneously tying your hands, preventing you from creating derivative works or even just giving it away… for the res t of your life, and that of your kids’. In the unlucky case, you can’t afford to promote your product, so you toil for years with little to no reward for your work. Then AI techbros scrape your art and sell it back to you exclusively for their profit.
Copyright has some great marketing, but it offers you little while the rich claim ownership over your art, and our society.
Billionaires are a threat to all of us.
You can just make stickers and put them on your steam machine. Just give the designs for free. The final product looks like a case for the machine, maybe create 3D designs for people to 3D print them?
I do wonder if Valve will do a 180 and agree to license it. Seems like they could stand to make good money by just charging dbrand a per-unit fee
If I had a steam machine I’d want one of these
I’m not gonna lie, not being able to buy it makes me want the steam machine less. Sadly I don’t even need one to begin with.
Agree, but mostly its the AI companies that make me not want to buy it
99% certain this is what will end up happening.
Its not even a 180.
Its… you used our IP without asking, please go to the back of the line, fill out the form where you properly ask for permission to use it, and wait in the queue again.
All they had to do was ask permission first.
I doubt it, they seemed pretty pissed at how dbrand works.
Funny thing noone talks about, they had a bunch of existing skins for other devices that use Valve IP, for years. The big thing here is the Steam Machine case cancellation, but they actually also removed lots of other designs they had the entire time.
So not only they flew too close to the Sun on this new product, they ended up losing a bunch of existing products that Valve never called then out on earlier.
They might have gotten away with a “future space crate” design, without the hearts. And then throw in a set of “I ❤️ Dbrand” stickers that you can snip the heart out of.
They could still do a generic “shipping crate” case, with handy little front cover removal tool and storage slot (crowbar emoji goes here).
This is a marketing stunt
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Found the dbrand sock puppet.
They should have made it cost 50% more than planned as a tribute.
