Mere after the reveal of the Valve Steam Machine , accessory maker Dbrand announced that it was releasing the "Companion Cube," a Steam Machine accessory that was modelled after the Portal weighted companion cube storage box. Following massive interest in the Companion Cube in the week since its announcement, Dbrand announced that it has been forced by Valve to pull the product from its website and social media pages, despite Dbrand's efforts to retroactively seek licensing rights from Valve in response to the takedown notice. Dbrand has complied and wiped the Companion Cube from its online presence, redirecting the product page link to a Reddit post explaining the situation, but fortunately the original product page had been archived before the Companion Cube's untimely demise.

Dbrand explained in the post on r/Dbrand on Reddit that it was contacted by Valve's legal team and informed that the Companion Cube was Valve's intellectual property and that the accessory maker did not have license to use the IP in such a capacity. According to Dbrand, the Companion Cube was the culmination of seven months and over a thousand hours of engineering work that resulted in four sets of injection molds being produced. The Companion Cube was reportedly Dbrand's second-fastest-selling product to date behind the Switch 2 Killswitch, and fans of the design have expressed both disappointment in Dbrand for not approaching Valve and licensing the product correctly and understanding that Valve may not want its brand attached to a product whose engineering and thermal qualities cannot necessarily be verified.