Shameless Palworld imitator Pickmos removed from Steam after publisher 'officially intervenes' in development: 'We will be supervising the Pickmos team'

Just a couple days after Palworld imitator Pickmon changed its title to Pickmos "to better align with our brand identity," the whole thing has been removed from Steam, and it sounds like developer PocketGame may have had its wrist slightly slapped in the process.

Ironically, the apparent rebuke comes from NetworkGo, the publisher of Pickmos, who in a message on X rather oddly appeared to suggest that this whole mess is PocketGames' fault.

"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 PocketGame. We will be supervising the Pickmos team from a player’s perspective to ensure the game keeps getting better."

Confusingly, a message that appeared to come from PocketGame, the developer of Pickmos, was posted on the same X account just prior to the NetworkGo intervention announcement, also indicating that NetworkGo has assumed creative control: "We are revising the game to ensure a controversy-free experience. It will be re-released once our publisher gives the final approval."

Pickmos has indeed been controversial. PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter described it as "shameless" in its imitation of Pokémon, saying that Palworld—literally the target of a Nintendo lawsuit—"feels like a paragon of creative integrity" by comparison.

"Pickmon hasn't filed the serial number off of Pokémon—it's just crossed it out with crayon," Lincoln wrote. "And it didn't stop there: In its trailers and screenshots, Pickmon is also copying homework from the Legend of Zelda, Overwatch, and even Palworld itself."

Plenty of others shared this assessment, and last week the dev team took steps to address the problem by, as mentioned, changing a single letter of the game's title—although it said the creatures in the game would still collectively be known as Pickmon, because sure, why not.

The reaction to that change was about what you'd expect—astonishment and disbelief at what Lincoln called, beautifully, "the Olympian ballsiness of its visual knockoffery"—and the reaction to the reaction actually had me wondering if the whole thing was a bit.

In response to allegations that Pickmon stole work from a fan artist, the studio asked "Mr. Fakemon"—fakemon being the name of a subreddit dedicated to fake Pokémon created by fans—"to provide proof of the trademark rights for the designs in question."

Maybe it's just the language barrier, or maybe the poor guy manning the Pickmos socials has somehow never heard of Pokémon or Overwatch, but even if that's true this one is very funny to me. It's the sort of answer I'd give long-suffering PC Gamer editorial director Tim Clark if he told me I'd screwed something up in a massive and very public way.

Part of me thinks this "publisher taking over" announcement is simple misdirection: Defusing the situation by claiming that a group of unsupervised ne'er-do-wells was causing trouble, but now the adults are in the room and everything's going to be fine. But those earlier X posts make me wonder if maybe this really was just a group of unsupervised ne'er-do-wells causing trouble, and the adults have finally decided that they don't need the legal headaches this thing is so clearly inviting.

Whatever the underlying cause, you can see evidence of the existence of Pickmos on SteamDB, but otherwise, it's gone. Whether it ever actually comes back, we will wait and see.