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.
Murse@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Am skeptical.
They might just sincerely be stupid, but this all carries a strong scent of bullshit.
My money’s on a calculated PR move, with almost no investment made into leading up to the action from Valve, culminating with a woe-is-me to stir up some community support.
jmill@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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.
Murse@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
In most contexts, yes.
The problem with that rule is most malicious people are well aware of it, making the appearance of stupidity a tool to free them from accountability. Look at politics - we (collectively) give Trump the village idiot pass, ogling at someone could be so stupid as to blunder their way into the absolute worst economic, tactical, social, etc outcome possible. He’s not an outlier in that behavior, and corporate reps / CEOs often do the same shit.
I don’t have the insider knowledge to say with certainty that any one instance is an example or not, but I definitely reject the whole ‘never attribute to malice’ spiel.
jmill@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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.