Earlier this week, developer PocketGame announced that it was changing the name of its survival-crafting and creature-collecting game Pickmon to Pickmos. The game bears more than a passing resemblance to Palworld and Pokemon, and amidst heavy criticism of how flagrantly it appears to copy the homework of those games, its publisher, Networkgo, has decided to pull Pickmos from Steam.
In a Steam update, Networkgo explained that it’ll be taking a more active hand in the development of Pickmos. “We’ve heard your feedback regarding the removal of our Steam store page and want to clear things up,” the publisher wrote. “Networkgo has officially intervened in the development of Pickmos. We will be supervising the PocketGame team from a player’s perspective to ensure the game keeps getting better.”
Ever since it was first revealed last month, Pickmos has been accused of being an off-brand Pokemon clone. Claims of PocketGame stealing “Fakemon” designs from Pokemon fan artists to use in the game haven’t helped its cause, and its reasoning for changing a single letter of the game title to “better align” with its brand identity has been met with skepticism.
PocketGame added in a social media post that it is “revising the game to ensure a controversy-free experience,” and that it will be re-released once it has gotten a stamp of approval from Networkgo. The comparisons to Palworld have also been very obvious since Pickmos was unveiled, and even the name of PocketGame reads like a veiled attempt to cash in on Pocketpair’s fame before it finally releases its hit early-access game into 1.0.
Meanwhile, calling a creature-collecting game Pickmon was just asking for trouble from Nintendo, as the video game giant hasn’t hesitated in the past to unleash its legal team in order to protect the Pokemon IP, of which it is a co-owner.