They used to advertise for Nike. Now they do the opposite of every publisher.

Act 1 · The Founder

In Nashville, Tennessee, you expect everything but a board game company. It's the city of country music, recording studios, live guitar on every corner — not exactly the capital of die-cut cardboard. Yet it was here, in a poster-lined co-working space, that Zach Dixon and Sam Cowden opened an animation studio in 2012. Clients like Nike, Amazon, J.J. Abrams. Big stuff.

The problem was that big stuff vanished. Zach would spend three, four months on a project, pour his heart into it, and then Nike would run it for two weeks as an Instagram ad and poof — gone, forever. At some point, he got fed up. He no longer wanted to make things designed to disappear: he wanted to make objects that people kept.

From there, in 2019, the games division was born. They brought in Austin Harrison to lead it, who had come to the studio chasing a girl to Nashville and then stayed. He knew nothing about publishing games. After six months on the first prototype, his professional opinion was one: let's stop, it doesn't work, it's not fun. Zach and Sam told him to keep going. Thankfully.

That first game hit the market, and in three years the division, which was meant to be an experiment, generated $5 million in revenue with no external investment — enough to forever change what IV Studio was.

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Act 2 · The Manifesto Game

Moonrakers was born out of a very specific annoyance. Austin loves deck-builders, but hates watching others play their turn. So, one evening, Zach asked him: what if we made a deck-builder where you also play on other people's turns? From that question came all of IV's DNA — negotiation, temporary alliances, the table that never stops.

"My least favorite part is watching other people play deck building games."
— Austin Harrison, IV Studio

But what truly defined their editorial line wasn't the mechanism. It was a production choice. Moonrakers had metal coins from its very first print run. This was madness for a newcomer: if you sold two thousand copies with that quality, you'd lose your shirt. IV could afford it for one reason only — the animation agency's money covered the risk. They could aim for maximum quality from day one, when no one else could.

The result is that the name IV became synonymous with that level of quality. Those who bought their games trusted them even before opening the box, and that trust became the studio's true capital. Every subsequent title — Veiled Fate, Fractured Sky, Brink, Tend — started from that standard instead of having to earn it. It's the luxury of being born premium rather than becoming it. And it's also why today eight people churn out six or seven games a year: the trust in their production quality is already there, it doesn't need to be rebuilt every time.

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Act 3 · The Bet

Here, IV does something almost no one else does, and they do it on purpose. While the rest of the industry chases as many localizations as possible — French, German, Spanish, Italian, every language an extra sale — they go in the opposite direction: a single edition, in English, shipped worldwide from their own warehouses.

It's not an ideological stance. It's a scar. With all the added languages, Veiled Fate ended up having eighteen different boxes to produce and ship — a chaos that Austin now dismisses as a mistake never to be repeated. From that came the new rule: one Kickstarter edition, more curated than the retail one, and that's it. Retail and distribution exist, but they intentionally keep them light — very strong on Kickstarter, weak on the shelf, and they're fine with that.

And here, I admit, they won me over. In 2025, they doubled down: when American import duties arrived, they brought forward the release of three small games to raise cash and cover Brink's import costs — back-to-back campaigns, against the current, on their own terms.

Bet

Going against the grain on localizations A single English edition, sold directly from their own hubs, while the entire market multiplies languages to multiply sales. It was born from the chaos of Veiled Fate's eighteen boxes and strengthened in 2025 with early campaigns to absorb import duties. Our Family Plays Games · Interview with Austin Harrison · July 11, 2025

And here the circle closes. Zach had left advertising because he couldn't stand making things destined to disappear within someone else's brand. Today, IV refuses to let their games disappear into someone else's language or onto someone else's shelf: it's the same instinct as back then, transformed into a business model.