PM Studios has been doing physical game publishing for a long time. In its early days, around 20 years ago, the Las Vegas-based publisher brought the Korean rhythm-action series DJMax to the US, and since then it has carved out a healthy business from slapping a wide range of titles onto discs and cartridges.
“I’d say we have about a hundred or more games that we back up on the physical side on a yearly basis,” CEO Michael Yum tells GamesIndustry.biz, adding that PM Studios does a lot of the physical publishing for various other publishers. “When you sign one of those guys up, you have like 10 games a year from just them alone.”
Down the years, PM Studios has helped many developers release their games in different regions. “I had a lot of friends in Korea who couldn’t release their games,” says Yum, “so I was bringing games from Korea and China over to America and Europe.” And one of those games had an outsized impact – Black Myth: Wukong.
Yum says he regarded Black Myth as “one of our biggest risks” when PM Studios took on physical publishing duties, but the outcome went beyond his wildest expectations. “I didn’t know it was going to be that big. When it took off, yeah, it was quite an experience. I’ve never seen anything like that.” He says that this one title was so huge that it “covered everything else”.
Yet the irony is that just as PM Studios has been seeing massive success in its physical publishing business, the rug has been pulled from underneath them with Sony’s announcement that it will end disc production for the PlayStation in January 2028.
Untimely death
“It’s sad and devastating,” says Yum. “My first games were on PlayStation, and I’m primarily a PlayStation player, so obviously I play a lot of physical games on PlayStation. But truthfully, I see a lot of the new generation of gamers buying digital copies.” He says his own young children, members of the digital-native generation, “get confused about putting the disc in.”
But PM Studios will continue to support physical publishing as best as it can, he says. “We are looking for new ways to bring the games out. It’s unfortunate, but eventually it will have to probably be a code in a box. We want to emphasise the collectibility of the IPs and fan service, so we’ll probably make very nice premium stuff and bundle it together, and figure out unique ways to support it.”
Even though digital games are on the rise and account for the majority of sales worldwide, Yum points out that there’s still a very strong physical market for games aimed at younger players. PM Studios published the kids’ game Bluey’s Quest For The Gold Pen, and he says that roughly 80% of that game’s sales were physical.
He adds that big IPs still “do very well at retail”, and there’s also a healthy market for physical versions of indie titles that have already performed strongly in terms of digital sales, such as Animal Well. “I did the mass retail version with Lost in Cult, and it did extremely well,” he says, even though a limited-edition physical version of Animal Well had already been released through Limited Run. “The fans come back to support the physical version of the game. The collectors are buying stuff.”
There’s also the economic appeal of a physical game that can be shared rather than tied to one person’s account. “I have twins, so I have a unique case where I don’t want to buy two digital copies of the game,” Yum says. “So I buy one, and they learn to share it and let their friends borrow it.”
But beyond anything else, he thinks the outcry over the end of physical discs is down to players feeling like they are losing something, even if the vast majority of sales are digital. “People are very upset because you’re taking away a choice.”
AA potential
Given that time is running out for physical releases, at least on PlayStation, PM Studios is adapting. “That’s why you do see us doing a lot more digital titles,” says Yum. The publisher is still championing physical releases – it’s behind the upcoming physical version of AdHoc Studio’s smash hit Dispatch, for example – but in addition it’s taking on full publishing duties for titles like My Time at Evershine.
PM Studios is also working with Telltale on the long-in-gestation sequel The Wolf Among Us 2. “I got to meet the CEO, and obviously there were a lot of struggles there to finish this game, and I told them what I could do to help out,” says Yum.
“The biggest part was funding,” he says. “I told them that I can help invest and fund this game, and I could bring in my marketing team and production team operations to help finish the game in a timely manner.” Now, he says the publisher’s aim is to “take bigger risks on bigger IPs”.
PM Studios isn’t the only company that’s trying to adapt to the move away from physical releases. The Singapore-based group GCL Global Holdings was primarily built around physical game distribution, but now the firm is betting on AA publishing through its subsidiary 4Divinity, which recently made a splash at Gamescom.
Yum says that PM Studios, impressed by the success of Black Myth: Wukong, also sees great potential in AA games. He notes that the sheer number of games available in digital marketplaces makes it hard to stand out, but that people are “a little bit more excited for AA games” thanks to the quality of the graphics.
“I want every game to do well, especially the indie stuff, but when you put a video out there, people tend to look at the flashier stuff. So it just happens to attract people more easily.”
He doesn’t want to abandon indie games, though: in fact he says PM Studios remains a “big champion” for them. “We’re continuing to support a lot of these indies and helping them finish their game and release it on Switch 2. And we were one of the first to release Switch 2 games and do the full game on card.” The hope is to use some of the success from bigger games “to help try new indie titles out.”
Still, he recognises the risk that AA games entail as a result of their higher initial investments, so PM Studios is trying to play it safe. “We will make sure that it has something to it, like either an IP attached, or it’s a sequel to something, or the developer was very credible, or the wishlists were there. Anything we can do to help reduce some of that risk.”
China rising
Yum has been particularly impressed with the AA games that are now coming out of China, not only in terms of the games themselves, but also in terms of the sheer speed of the development teams. “I’ve been working a lot with Chinese developers,” he says. “To be honest with you, it’s incredible. The developers, they are fast, they’re very, very fast. They’re very hungry and they’re very talented. They can make anything so amazing right now.
“It’s definitely going to change a lot for the landscape, because I think they are setting the bar now. They’re making games way faster than everyone else, way cheaper than everyone else. So if the rest of the world doesn’t keep up with them, they’re going to take over. And truthfully, Tencent and NetEase own everything: they already own the industry, they own everything out there. So it’s like we’re already losing to them.”
PM Studios isn’t solely focusing its search for games on China, though: Yum points out that most of the publisher’s upcoming releases are from Western developers. And the company remains firmly behind physical. It recently launched the community platform Panax to bring together collectors of physical games and merchandise.
“We’ve been developing it for years now,” says Yum. “It recently went viral because of this trophy tracking thing that we posted. I can’t wait until everybody sees all the new features that we put in and all the benefits that the publishers will get by being on this platform.”
Physical games might be on the way out – but there are some, at least, who will be banging the drum for them until the bitter end.
