IndieBox

» see indiebox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A twenty dollar cardboard box mailed monthly from Orlando was never going to have a Turkish edition. Subscription boxes as a category barely landed here at all, and the ones that did were cosmetics rather than games. IndieBox is a product I can describe accurately and had no route to.

The pitch was straightforward enough to explain in one line. Indie games in 2014 existed as Steam downloads and nothing else, so IndieBox picked one a month, licensed it and built the retail edition that the developer had never been able to afford to make.

The boxes were the point. They were sized and printed to look like PC software from the early nineties, back when buying a game meant carrying home a rectangle bigger than a hardback book. Inside was a DRM-free copy of the game on disc, or on a USB stick in the earliest runs, plus a Steam key for the people who were going to install it that way regardless. There was a printed manual, a soundtrack CD and one collectible item that existed only in that month's box.

It started in may 2014 with Teslagrad, a Norwegian puzzle platformer that had come out the year before, and it was run by John Carter and Jason Blank along with James Morgan out of Orlando, Florida.

~ the case file ~

~ the box was the whole product ~

Every subscription box service is selling anticipation more than contents, and IndieBox was selling something narrower than that: the physical object a game had never had. The game itself was already available for less money on Steam, usually on discount, and any subscriber could have bought it in ten seconds without leaving the couch.

So what people were paying for was the artifact and the curation. Somebody had chosen this game out of the several hundred released that month, negotiated with the developer, designed a box for it and put a manual inside. For a certain kind of buyer who remembered when software came in packaging worth keeping, that was worth twenty dollars a month. The question was always how many of those buyers there were.

~ the math on cardboard ~

The answer was not enough. IndieBox said as much directly when it closed, with the line that the subscription model is really tough, and then explained the actual problem: producing a genuine collector's edition every single month took an amount of work that the subscriber count could not pay for.

Nothing about that scales the way software does. A digital storefront serves its ten thousandth customer for nothing, while the ten thousandth box still needs printing, assembling and shipping. Physical media businesses built on top of digital-only products keep hitting this, and the ones that survive tend to do occasional limited runs rather than a hard monthly deadline. IndieBox committed to twelve collector's editions a year and every one of them was a manufacturing project.

~ what shipped last ~

The announcement came on 2 october 2017. Existing subscriber accounts were closed and the company said it would look after anyone whose subscription ran past the final shipment. That final shipment was Torchlight II, the 2012 action role-playing game from Runic, in a Collector's Edition.

The company did not fold. It turned toward helping indie developers with online storefront work and one-off physical editions instead, which is the same skill applied without the monthly clock. But indiebox.com no longer resolves, and the subscription that made the name is finished. What it proved is that the appetite for physical indie game releases is real and that it is not monthly.

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