In news that surprises absolutely nobody, Pickmos - a game so unoriginal it apparently copied Palworld, which itself has a... complicated relationship with originality - has been yanked from Steam. According to Nintendo Life, publisher Networkgo pulled the plug and issued what might be the most awkward statement in gaming history: "We will be supervising the Pickmos team."
Developer PocketGame had been cooking up this creature-collector, previously known as Pickmon, which featured designs that looked suspiciously familiar to iconic Pokémon, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild assets, and yes, even Palworld's already-sus creature roster. That's a hat trick of intellectual property chaos right there - truly speedrunning the "cease and desist" any%.
Copying the copiers
The sheer audacity of ripping off Palworld - a game that was already dragged through the internet for its own resemblance to Nintendo's beloved franchises - is genuinely impressive in the worst possible way. It's like photocopying a photocopy and then being shocked when the quality is terrible.
PC Gamer first flagged the removal, and Networkgo's intervention suggests this wasn't exactly a clean internal operation. The "supervision" wording implies PocketGame may have been operating a little too freely with their creative inspirations, and the publisher finally decided to hit the respawn button on the whole situation before lawyers started loading into the lobby.
What happens next?
Whether Pickmos returns to Steam in some heavily redesigned form remains to be seen. If it does come back, those creature designs are going to need more than a palette swap to pass legal muster. Nintendo's legal team is famously not the kind of final boss you want to aggro, and The Pokémon Company has a long memory and an even longer list of takedowns under its belt.
For now, Pickmos joins the ever-growing pile of games that learned the hard way that "inspiration" only gets you so far before someone with a legal budget shows up at your door. RIP to the boldest unhinged creature-collector we almost got to play.
