Pickmon, the blatant ripoff of Pokémon, Breath of the Wild, and also, somehow, Palworld, looks like a genuine attempt to ragebait the famously litigious Nintendo. However, perhaps we shouldn’t celebrate the team behind Pickmon for sticking it to the man too soon, as two independent artists are now accusing the developers of ripping off the designs of their Pokémon fan art.
If you ask me, there’s something extremely suspect about Pickmon. Call it a hunch or an educated guess, but the team behind the game, on both the development and publishing sides, is giving me bad vibes. Firstly, as many have already pointed out, the developer goes by two different names in Pickmon’s debut trailer: “PocketGame” and “PokeGame.”
Both dev names are obvious pokes at Pokémon and Pocket Monsters, which implies that, maybe, they just wanted to piss Nintendo off twice. The publisher’s name, NETWORKGO, sounds close enough to Nintendo that I’d wager that’s also a not-so-subtle dig, too. Plus, NETWORKGO’s only other game, Hainya World, looks like it ripped its designs straight from MapleStory.
But, hey, I could justify taking a swing at Nintendo. It’s their funeral, because we’re talking about the company that’s actually ballsy enough to sue the United States government here, but you do you, Pickmon. However, what I can’t justify is stealing designs from fan artists, especially when it’s for monetary gain.
As spotted by Dexerto, two different Pokémon fan artists have accused Pickmon of ripping off their designs for Mega Ceruledge and Mega Meganium. While the Mega Ceruledge ripoff is less blatant, but still pretty bold, artist el.psy.fake’s Mega Meganium design appears to be copied 1-to-1 in Pickmon.
“Pickmon, an upcoming game that’s been accused of ripping off designs from other artists and famous franchises like Pokémon, has also stolen one of my designs,” writes el.psy.fake in a post on Instagram. “They didn’t even try to change something and make it a bit less obvious.”
Unfortunately, as scummy as this is, I have a feeling that the team behind Pickmon did this intentionally to get people talking about their game. That’s because the official Pickmon YouTube channel has been bragging about all of the negative attention they’ve received so far. “A huge thank you to all the gaming media outlets! Thanks to your support, we’ve hit 25 million impressions in under 48 hours. We couldn’t have done it without you!”
Well, these small independent artists certainly can’t do anything about this. Shame that there’s not some big, scary video game company with a very strong legal case to take them to task for all this. Man, the fact that they’ve got me rooting for Nintendo is really a testament to how much these guys suck.
