You may not have heard of PM Studios yet, but you’ve definitely heard of the games it’s had a hand in creating. At LVL UP Expo in Las Vegas last weekend, the publisher and developer hosted a massive play area featuring demos for many of its and its partner studios’ new and upcoming games, including Yooka-Replaylee, Dragon Is Dead, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, Table Flip Simulator, and last year’s Black Myth: Wukong.
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During the Expo, I sat down with PM Studios founder and CEO Mike Yum to talk about its history in game development and distribution, its upcoming projects, and his many successes with physical releases in a digital-dominated market.
TheGamer: Can you give us a little history lesson of PM Studios?
Mike Yum: Sure, so I started this company close to 20 years ago. As a developer, I made a game called DJMax. I couldn’t get the game published, so I published it myself. The game took off. It was a top seller for PSP in South Korea next to Monster Hunter, and then the company took off and we started to do work for hire. We made some Barbie games, but I wasn’t really happy doing that.
And then, finally, when the Vita came around, Sony asked if we could reboot DJMax for the Vita, so I did, and then that took off. I had a lot of friends who couldn’t publish their games, so I started to help them out. Then they told their friends, and it led to racing games and RPGs and action games; we kind of did things differently. We come from a retail background, so I had the capabilities to do retail distribution for other publishers and developers. We do a lot of co-publishing and distribution for a lot of companies and a lot of games.
TG: Okay, so there are sort of like three different arms of the company. There’s the development and the publishing, and then the partner publishing and distribution. Have you always done all three of those?
Yum: We’ve been doing all three for a while. A lot of why you don’t see our name out there is because we do a lot of white label service, so I don’t put our brand in front of the package. I kind of emphasize the developer, and we’re the guys kind of behind the scenes. A lot of the industry guys know what we do, so I think the word of mouth has spread, and I think Black Myth: Wukong was probably one of the big ones where everybody realized who we were, but we’ve been doing this for a long time.
TG: It’s such an eclectic group of games. Everything I got to play this weekend all had very different experiences. Do you feel like there is a brand to PM?
Yum: So, sadly, probably not. I think our biggest problem is that, you know, when you think of fighting games, you think of Capcom. RPGs, you think of Atlas. Sports games, a lot of people think of EA. So, we just love games, maybe a little too much. There’s not a strict focus on what genre, so I think that’s why when you see all of our titles, you see family games, co-op games, action-RPGs, action games, first-person shooters; It’s a lot of indie games, and we’re trying to look at every game and see if we think we can help that group out. See if it’s something we feel like we can take on and work out a good partnership, and we try to help everyone.
TG: Are there games that are singularly developed in-house that aren’t partnered with any other studios?
Yum: Yep, we still develop our own games. Right now, we have a game called Dragon is Dead from an internal team. With that game, a lot of us were rhythm game developers, but we loved Diablo 2 and we didn’t have the capabilities of doing a top-down 3D full-on Action-RPG. So, we said, hey, we’re good at 2D sprites, let’s try to make a 2D Diablo. And that’s that game.
I met a developer. He modded this game called Roshpit Champions for DOTA, and I convinced him that we should make a standalone game. So, now, we’re making Roshpit Champions 2 in-house. Evolutist is another game that I met the developers of a long time ago. They were trying to do Kickstarter, and they asked me to be a producer on the project, so I took it on. And we’ve been developing this thing for almost five years now. It’s taking a long time because our goal was to hand-draw everything.
TG: It seems like you have a really good eye for choosing projects. What is that process like?
Yum: I’m just a really big gamer. I play a lot of video games, I used to compete. I’m a completionist, so I still get 100 percent of the achievements in a lot of games. I have over 300 Platinum trophies on the PlayStation. I play a lot of games. I kind of know what I think could work, or something new I’ve never seen in a long time. Like our game Table Flip Simulator, we saw an arcade game a long time ago where you flip a table. You actually literally flip a table at the arcade. We thought, hey, we should recreate something like that for this new audience. We try all kinds of unique stuff.
TG: Do you feel like when you see something you like, you have a fully formed idea of what you could do with it?
Yum: Yeah, I do. And maybe I might not like a game, but another team member really likes it.. We have a process where we allow them to actually fight for the game. So, it’s almost like the developer pitching to us, but actually one of our own guys is pitching to us why he thinks this game is gonna work. I don’t want to be the only guy choosing games, so I let everybody have a say. These days I want to be less of the green light guy. It should be up to everybody as a collective group. But in cases where I get to meet guys like Playtonic Games, and have a chance to work with ex-Rare guys that worked on Banjo-Kazooie, that was like a given. I really wanted to be a part of it.
TG: But I imagine a lot of your publishing does reflect your taste.
Yum: Yeah, but again, more than half of the stuff you see isn’t really me. Like Black Myth: Wukong, I knew about it, and of course, I loved it. But it was a lot of the team members that really kept pushing and pushing and pushing and fighting for that project.
TG: Physical distribution seems like it’s something that’s becoming more challenging. Now that digital distribution has become most of the market, how has that changed things for you?
Yum: Four years ago, it started to shift a lot, but I’d say about a year and a half to two years ago, it kind of shifted the other way. You can think of it like the mobile market, where anybody can publish anything and put it out on the digital marketplace. The video game market is completely flooded. We have thousands of games come out at a time, and so everybody’s pretty much dead. Everyone is saying they released games on Steam last year, and they didn’t do well. And now everybody’s shutting down.
But when you look at retail, not everyone can put it out there. Not everyone can release on console. You need a certain expertise and resources to release something there, so it’s a little bit curated. It’s a smaller market that’s a little bit harder to get into, so we’ve actually done better because we don’t have as much competition. You go to Target or Best Buy and you’ll see 30 PlayStation games, 40 Switch games. It’s much easier to attract customers in a store, whereas when we’re on the eShop or the PlayStation Network, you can’t find the game unless you search for it.
TG: That’s interesting. When you go to GameStop or Target, every box is the same size. They’re all on a wall, but it’s not that way on Steam and Nintendo, some games are bigger than others and you don’t really have any control over that.
Yum: Yep, unless you’re a big publisher, you get no visibility. Our relationship with retail gives us opportunities. I’m able to put trailers in stores and hang posters.
TG: So it’s like shifting to more like the collector and hobbyist audience that cares about physicals?
Yum: There’s multiple markets there. You have a lot of hardcore gamers who refuse to buy digital. You have a lot of moms and dads buying [physical]. And then the casual walk-ins looking for a game when they buy the system.
TG: I feel like I’m starting to care more about having physical things for the games I really like.
Yum: I think it’s important because it’s a different experience. You could let your friend borrow it, you know? I met my best friend by letting him borrow a game in school, and then he let me borrow his game. So now you have a type of relationship with the physical copy. You could still trade it in and get another game. Later, you might really want to play it again, but if you don’t have an internet connection or the PlayStation Network goes down, whatever happens, that stops you from playing. I think physical games are still important.
TG: Is that something you want to make sure that you’re maintaining?
Yum: I’m trying my best. Every company that tries to work with us or asks for help, I really try my best to make sure that we can support them. I think you will probably see a lot of news from us, especially after Black Myth.
TG: I imagine for physical that did very well.
Yum: Yeah, I wish I could reveal the number, but those guys are very private and I respect that. But it’s shown me and all the distributors and partners and retailers out there that it’s very healthy still. I got a lot of calls like during Christmas and after the New Year’s thanking me and saying that it saved their business. There’s a lot of territories. It was a huge hit in certain countries like Spain and Italy and I didn’t know why. In places where they still don’t have advanced internet technology, they won’t download a 100-gigabyte disk because they’re paying per data. In places like that, where the bandwidth is low or slower, they were very much waiting for a physical copy of the game.
Check out our preview for some of PM Studios’ upcoming games that were featured at this year’s LVL UP Expo.
PM Studios
- Date Founded
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2008
- CEO
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Michael Yum
- Headquarters
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Los Angeles, CA
