The story
At the close of 1997, DigiCube reported that their vending machine service had exceeded 10 million software units since the service launched in November 1996. At its peak in 1998, DigiCube recorded sales of 8.6 million units, equaling ¥46.8 billion JPY. Digicube started carrying the PlayStation 2 in March 2000, with sales of 100,000 consoles and 400,000 games. By May 2000, the company offered thirty-one software titles from fourteen different companies. In February 2001, after a thaw in relations between Nintendo and Square, Digicube began distributing Game Boy games for the first time.
In the following years, however, sales declined precipitously. Although ownership of DigiCube was passed to the newly created Square Enix following the merger of Square with its former rival Enix in early 2003, it was already approximately 9.5 billion yen in debt. Following the announcement that the much-anticipated Final Fantasy XII would be delayed until sometime in 2004 (eventually released in 2006), DigiCube filed for bankruptcy liquidation at the Tokyo District Court on November 26, 2003. The bankruptcy would cost the newly merged Square Enix ¥760 million JPY. The bankruptcy also caused a 3.6% drop in Square Enix's stock with the announcement, and other Japanese stocks were affected.
From Wikipedia’s article on DigiCube, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3