In work stuff, I wrote a bit about the Square-Enix merger on its anniversary: what the Japanese game industry at the time was like, why optimism was high for the new company, and the weird albatrosses Square and Enix had around their necks at the time that were dragging them down. Surprisingly, not The Spirits Within!
Researching the so-called "Enix Family Feud" that caused a mass exodus of manga artists was quite fun, though a lot of the info there had to be condensed heavily--there was a fair bit of bitterness and lawsuits and people getting panties in a twist over what counts as "shonen" manga. I do suggest looking up エニックスお家騒動 if you are willing to wade through a lot of Japanese info and you're interested.
Digicube, though, is something I find weirdly fascinating. Basically, it was a mixed-media publishing arm of Square, but moreso a company that got games and consoles into combini. You'd grab a tag from a wall, bring it up to the counter, and the clerk would give you your game, like at Toys R Us way back in the day. They also installed TVs and kiosks to show ads and play information about various games, which I'm sure the low-wage staff loved hearing 24 hours a day. Interestingly, Digicube sold PlayStation games primarily, but also stuff for the Saturn and Dreamcast, meaning that Square did have some sort of business relationship established with Sega.
There was also some sort of music-distribution kiosk system, which I assume is like, you buy music and it records to a minidisc or something similar. Information on this is hard to find, especially since much of the late 90s-early 00s Japanese internet that would talk about these things has been erased.
Particularly interesting to me is that it seems Digicube had some exclusive games that could only be bought through their combini operations. I've seen recollections that Bushido Blade and Mr. Bones were two such titles, but it's hard to find confirmations. There were also Digicube-exclusive editions and pre-order bonuses, of course, but I really want to know about the true exclusives, if they actually exist. (I could ask Japanese folks I know, but how many people retain that sort of information after all this time?)
Anyway, Digicube failed for a lot of reasons, one of the biggest being that games were mostly fixed-price. Since most traditional stores can't return unsold stock to distributors, they start offering massive discounts when titles don't move to expectations--the outparcel "wagon sales" you'll see at electronics stores. No discounts meant stuff that didn't move would never move for Digicube, and wound up as returns.
Man, late-90s Square is just chock-full of fascinating hubris. And somehow, people are still convinced it's the company's golden era....