I used to think that there were competent people that knew what was going on. Turns out that most people at every level are incompetent idiots that just fake it.

Most of the actual competent people are just sitting quietly doing their work, and don't generally end up in charge of anything.

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.