How can a large company be run this poorly? I’m just a non-MBA having idiot and even I know you need to get rights and licenses to do this kind of stuff!
My only guess is that it was dbrand’s attempt to strong-arm Valve into a skewed licensing agreement. Like “look at all these preorders we already have! We already have the design done, we’re already set up to produce them, and we’ll be ready to ship as soon as this contract is done. Just sign here to give us {extremely unfair share}.”
Basically, a way to say “we’re already way ahead of the game, just sign the contract and you won’t need to worry about trying to catch up.” But Valve obviously disagreed.
Video game IP theft for merch/skins/etc tends to be extremely rampant already. Tons of sites are full of merch with game characters and iconography that is definitely copyrighted, (oftentimes ripped pixel-for-pixel directly from the game) and definitely not officially licensed. And most tend to skirt along unnoticed. Small fish in a big pond, I suppose. But in this case, Dbrand intentionally made themselves known to the bigger fish. And it clearly didn’t work out for them.
Just about everything in the world is so much more haphazard and fragile behind the scenes than it seems, I think. Corporations exist in such a haze of confusion and process chaos, especially.
They make skins for the steam deck, so it’s not like they didn’t know how to get permission to do this kind of thing. I sort of feel like this company does stupid shit on purpose to generate media coverage and considers the media coverage a win for brand recognition; financial consequences be damned.
They didn’t make sure to have the license before developing it. And it was not the first time to not get the license. Don’t blame others for your own failure.
Are they stupid, individual creators can do that for themselves, not to sell for a buisnees, why are so many dumbasses in positions of power and how can we rip them from the controls, like seriously.
And as we know Valve is a cesspool of capitalism obsessed cis white rightwing males so they obviously weren’t cool about it. Le usual.
