Interview Mike Yum Studios in LVL Up Expo 2025

You may have not heard of the Prime Minister's studios yet, but you definitely heard about the games that her hands were in creating. LVL Up Expo in Las Vegas Publisher and Developer held a large game zone last weekend, which presents demonstrations for many of their and their new and upcoming game partners, including Yooka-Replaye, Dragon Is Dead, Pipistrello and Damn Yoyo, Table Flap Simulator and last year Wukong.

During the exhibition, I sat down with the founder of the Studios Prime Minister and CEO Mike Yum, to talk about his history in the development and distribution of games, his upcoming projects and his many successes with physical releases in the market where digital ones prevail.

Thegamer: Can you give us a small PM Studios history lesson?

Mike Yum: Of course, so I launched this company close to 20 years ago. As a developer, I made a game called DJMAX. I could not publish the game, so I published it. The game took off. It was the PSP chief seller in South Korea next to Monster Hunter, and then the company flew and we started working. We've made a few Barbie games but I wasn't really glad for that.

And then, finally, when Vita came, Sony asked if we could restart DJMAX for Vita, so I still, and it took off. I had a lot of friends who could not publish my games, so I started helping them. Then they told their friends, and it led to racing games and RPG and combat games; We kind of doing everything differently. We come from retail, so I had the opportunity to engage in retail for other publishers and developers. We make a lot of joint publications and distribution for many companies and many games.

TG: Okay, so there are three different company weapons. There is a development and publication, and then a partnership and distribution. Have you always done all three?

Yum: We did all three for a while. A lot why you don't see our name is because we do a lot of white labels, so I don't supply our brand in front of the package. I kind of emphasize the developer, and we guys were behind the scenes. Many guys from the industry know what we do, so I think the mouth from the lips spread, and I think the black myth: Vucong was probably one of the biggest ones, where we all understood who we were, but we did it for a long time.

TG: This is such an eclectic group of games. All I needed to play this weekend was all very different experiences. Do you feel that there is a PM brand?

Yum: So, unfortunately, probably not. I think our biggest problem is that you know when thinking about combat games, you think about Capcom. RPG, you think about Atlas. Sports games, a lot of people think about EA. So we just love the game, maybe a little too much. There is no strict attention to which genre, so I think that when you see all our headlines, you see family games, cooperative games, RPG actions, combat games, first -person shooters; This is a lot of indie games, and we try to look at every game and see if we think we can help this group. Look when we feel what we can take over and work out a good partnership and we strive to help everyone.

TG: Are there games that do not cooperate with other studios?

Yum: Yes, we are still developing our own games. Now we have a game called Dragon Dead from the internal team. With this game, many of us were developers of rhythmic games, but we loved Diablo 2, and we didn't have the opportunity to do 3D-full RPG from top to bottom. So we said hey we are good at 2D sprites, let's try to make 2D Diablo. And this is such a game.

I met the developer. It changed this game called Roshpit Champions for Dota and I convinced it that we should do an autonomous game. So now we make Roshpit Champions 2 inboury. The evolutionary is another game I have long met with the developers. They tried to make Kickstarter and they asked me to become a project producer and I took it. And we have been developing this business for almost five years. It takes a long time because our goal was to make everything hand.

TG: It seems you have a really good look at the choice of projects. What is this process?

Yum: I'm just a really big gamer. I play a lot of video games, I competed. I am the final, so I still get 100 percent of achievements in many games. I have more than 300 platinum trophies on PlayStation. I play a lot of games. I know somehow that, in my opinion, it can work or something new I have never seen a long time ago. Like our Flip Simulator game table, we saw an arcade game a long time you turn the table. You actually literally turn the table into arcado. We thought hey we should recreate something similar for this new audience. We try all kinds of unique things.

TG: Do you feel like you see what you like, you have a fully formed idea of ​​what you could do with it?

Yum: Yes, I do. And maybe I may not like the game, but another team member loves. We have a process when we allow them to actually fight for the game. So, it's almost like a developer for us, but in fact one of our own guys goes to us why he thinks this game will work. I don't want to be the only guy who chooses the game, so I allowed everyone to say. These days I want to be less green light. This should depend on everyone as a collective group. But in cases where I meet such guys as Playtonic Games and I have the opportunity to work with former guys who worked on Banjo-Kazooie, it was like given. I really wanted to become part of it.

TG: But I imagine that a lot of your publication reflects your taste.

Yum: Yes, but again, more than half the things you see actually I am. Like the black myth: Wucong, I knew about it, and of course I liked it. But it was a lot of team members who really continued to push and push and press and fight for this project.

TG: Physical distribution seems like this is becoming more complicated. Now that the digital distribution has become mostly a market, how has it changed things for you?

Yum: Four years ago, he started to change a lot, but I would say that about one and a half years ago, this changed the other way. You can think about it as in the mobile market where everyone can publish something and put it in the digital market. The video game market is completely flooded. We had thousands of games at one time, and so everyone died largely. Everyone says last year they released games on Steam and they didn't have good. And now everyone is closed.

But if you look at the retail, not everyone can place it there. Not everyone can release on the console. You need some experience and resources to free something out there, so it's a little cuts. This is a smaller market that is a little harder to enter, so we really did better because we don't have much competition. You go to Target or Best Buy, and you will see 30 PlayStation games, 40 Switch Games. It is much easier to attract customers to the store, whereas when we are in ESHOP or PlayStation Network, you can't find the game if you are not looking for it.

TG: That's interesting. If you go to Gamestop or Target, each box of the same size. They are all on the wall, but it's not so on Steam and Nintendo, some games are bigger than others, and you really don't have any control over it.

Yum: Yes, if you are, if you are not a great publisher, you have no visibility. Our relations with retail give us opportunities. I can put the trailers in the stores and bring the posters.

TG: So, is it like a transition to a more like a collector and an amateur audience that cares about physical work?

Yum: There's several markets. You have a lot of hardcore gamers who refuse to buy digital. You buy a lot of moms and dads [physical]. And then random walks are looking for a game when they buy the system.

TG: It seems to me that I am starting to care more about having physical things for games I really like.

Yum: I think it's important because it's a different experience. You can let your friend borrow it, you understand? I met my best friend, allowing him to borrow a game at school, and then he allowed me to lend his game. So now you have a type of relationship with a physical copy. You can still trade them and get another game. Later, you may want to lose it again, but if you don't have the internet connection, or the PlayStation network is downgrades, which is what happens to play. I think physical games are still important.

TG: This is what you want to make sure you support?

Yum: I try my best. Every company that tries to work with us or asks for help, I really try to make sure we can support them. I think you will probably see a lot of news from us, especially after the black myth.

TG: I imagine that for the physical that did very well.

Yum: Yes, I want me to open the number, but these guys are very private and I respect it. But this is shown to me and all distributors, partners and sellers, which is still very healthy. I have a lot of calls as during Christmas, and after the New Year thanked me and said it saved their business. There are many territories there. It was a huge blow in certain countries such as Spain and Italy, and I didn't know why. In places where they still do not have advanced internet technologies, they do not load the 100-gigabyte drive because they pay for the data. In places where the bandwidth is low or slower, they were very much waiting for a physical copy of the game.

Check out our preview some upcoming PM Studios games that have been presented at this year's LVL Expo.