IndieBox: Interview with Marketing Overlord Liv Sagan [PAX South]

Being a huge supporter (to the detriment of my bank account) of geek subscription boxes, I was incredibly excited when I happened upon the IndieBox stand at PAX South. My eyes were drawn to physical copies of Indie titles I was well familiar with like Teslagrad, Super Win The Game, Steamworld Dig and more.

On the last day of the Expo, I was finally able to grab some time with Marketing Overlord (says so right on her business card and twitter) Liv Sagan at the IndieBox exhibition, which had become quite popular as the days went on.

So Liv, tell me about IndieBox

Liv Sagan: We make boxed collector’s editions of Indie games. We’re also a subscription company, so we box every single month. All our boxes are collector’s quality and we make all of the items that go inside of them. We partner with different developers every month and each game is just a little bit different. All of our games ship DRM free and include a Steam code. We ship all over the world and we love our subscribers.

How long has it been around?

The company started early last year but we shipped out our first box in May. That was Teslagrad and there’s a petition to have us reissue that box. Only 150 copies were made.

When you first started out did you reach out to developers or have they contacted you? Has that changed over time?

It’s always been a combination of the developers finding us and them being very excited about the idea. Alot of it has changed. A lot of it is luck. To be considered to be a featured game in one of our boxes, the game must run on Windows, Mac, and Linux, must have a 75 or better on Metacritic or an 8.0 or better on the IndieDB, the developer must contact us within six months of the game being released on version 1.0 (which means only finished games), and most importantly the game has to be awesome and not suck.

So, the way it works, it all is just the solo games each month. Have you all considered adding multiple games each time?

Most of our boxes will have a demo of something on them. Super Win The Game actually has a secondary full game on it. It’s Clusterpuck 99 by PHL Collective out of Philadelphia and it was a game that was so good, but it just wasn’t right for a future box. So we asked could we put it as a secondary game in one our of current boxes and they said “Sure! That’s awesome!”. It’s a spectacular game. It’s really evil soccer. Like, REALLY difficult soccer that you can play with up to 8 Xbox 360 controllers plugged into one PC at one time.

Is there a rough number of how many subscribers you guys have now?

We have just under 1000 subscribers. We have definitely jumped a lot here at PAX. Saturday was one of our single biggest subscriber jumps in the history of the company. [We] make our own stuff, nobody gives us anything to try to sell to other peope, we’re not partnered, all we want you to do is play a game. We’re really sort of rare in the subscription market, so to have that huge a number and that huge of an impact is amazing.

Well congratulations!

Thank you! We’re growing like crazy every single month. As our subscription base grows, we get bigger and more expensive games and the manufacturing prices will be going down. So the best way to keep this thing going is to subscribe! If you visit our website, you can use IndieBox10 to get 10% off. If you see someone streaming and you click the affiliate link, you help that go and keep IndieBox going month after month.