Back in our January 2024 launch impressions of Palworld, I wasn’t kind about its shameless design counterfeiting, calling its creatures “a surreal gallery of familiar eyes, limbs, and silhouettes” built from “the reassembled pieces of existing Pokémon, adding a color swap and a couple tweaked details to hide the Frankenstein stitching.”
I understand now that I had no idea what shamelessness really looks like. True shamelessness looks like Pickmon, which appeared as a Steam listing this week and should immediately communicate the depth of its blatant apery with its name alone. I mean, look at that thing. That’s just Pikachu with dyed eyebrows and a couple bits stuck on. Come on, man.
Like Palworld, Pickmon claims to be an open-world survival game where you’ll “team up with your Pickmon to fight, farm, and build industrial empires.” And yes, its Pokémon have guns, too.
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Compared to Pickmon, however, Palworld feels like a paragon of creative integrity. Pickmon hasn’t filed the serial number off of Pokémon—it’s just crossed it out with crayon. 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.
Take a look at its key art. In addition to Yassified Meganium and the aforementioned Sleep Paralysis Pikachu, there’s somebody cosplaying Breath of the Wild-era Link while surfing a Temu Charizard and brandishing a submachinegun.
The tower nearby is capped with a FF14 aetheryte for good measure, and down below—in an achievement of creative bankruptcy—is a creature that’s an exact midpoint between Palworld’s Anubis and the Lucario design on which it’s based.
Pickmon is doing knockoffs of knockoffs. We’ve reached knockoff singularity. And that’s not all. We’ve also got:
- Edgelord Mega Rayquaza with a bit of Origin Forme Giratina
- Rocky forest mammoth you can shoot with a gun, just like the other rocky forest mammoth you can shoot with a gun
- “It’s not Ceruledge if it’s a centaur”
While the inspirations are extremely obvious, it’s not likely that anything here is blatant enough to meet a threshold of legally actionable intellectual property infringement. After all, character design similarities weren’t the basis of Nintendo’s Palworld lawsuit, which was based instead on patents that Nintendo holds on—among other things—a specific implementation of catching monsters in throwable orbs.
And don’t worry: Pickmon developer PocketGame and publisher Networkgo have covered their legal bases there, because you don’t capture Pickmon by throwing balls at them, but by throwing cards. That’s a whole different shape. Checkmate, Nintendo.
Ultimately, the harder it is for companies to sue over visual resemblances, the better it is for our media ecosystem. But even if Pickmon’s shameless carboncopying of character designs is legal, that doesn’t mean it’s cool. I don’t want to encourage companies to churn out indistinguishable sludge any more than I want them suing other creative works for visual similarities.
Given how many millions of copies Palworld sold, however, it seems that encouragement wasn’t hard to find.
Pickmon doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can add it to your wishlist now if you don’t feel as queasy as I do.
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