Yeah, modern politics and big corporations can’t be adequately explained by stupidity though. At a certain point malice and greed are the only plausible explanations.

In this situation with D Brand, stupidity does seem adequate. It’s a lot of stupidity, but definitely not an unbelievable amount, especially since they’ve been doing similar things without it really biting them in the ass until now.

Although, I guess whether or not it is just a PR stunt there was a certain amount of shadiness happening. Either directed at the public if it was, or intending to make unlicensed profit off of Valve’s IP if it wasn’t.

Anything is possible, but they announced it very early, made what looks to be a good design, made enough examples to send to a bunch of content creators, and took pre-orders. For the this to be intended to be a PR stunt only, everything would have hinged on Valve sending them a C&D after they did all those things. What if Valve had ignored it? The most simple explanation is usually correct, and never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, lol.

If they made the tooling to mass produce the cubes like they claim they did, that advertising was very not free. In fact, paying for a lot of advertising would be quite a bit less money. I think they had been getting away with using Valve IP on skins for years, and thought they’d get away with this too.

I reserved one a minute before the posted go live time, got to order it Monday and it is arriving tomorrow.