Pickmos didn’t just vanish from Steam — it’s the first big casualty of the Palworld clone rush

Pickmos didn’t disappear from Steam because it was “too much like Pokémon.” It disappeared because the creature-collector gold rush finally hit a wall where even a publisher decided, yeah, this one’s too blatant to risk shipping.

Key takeaways

• Pickmos’ Steam page has been pulled before release after weeks of backlash that it was a shameless mash-up of Pokémon, Palworld, Zelda, and even Overwatch UI.
• Publisher NetworkGo has “officially intervened”, taking over supervision of developer PocketGame and promising a “controversy-free” relaunch once revisions are done.
• The team is now revising monsters, art, and assets amid accusations of plagiarism and possible stolen art, with NetworkGo publicly saying it’ll investigate before any re-release.
• This looks less like creative course-correction and more like legal damage control – a warning shot to every “Palworld but closer to Pokémon” project currently in the oven.

This wasn’t “inspired by” – it was a collage of other games

Pickmos (previously known as Pickmon, and before that reportedly Pikcmon) was pitched as a multiplayer creature-catching survival sandbox. On paper: fine. Plenty of games have ridden in the same lane as Pokémon or Palworld without getting torched.

The problem is how naked the borrowing was. Critics and players quickly pointed out monsters that looked uncomfortably close to Pikachu and Charizard, Palworld-style guns and survival systems, UI elements that screamed Overwatch, and even environmental flavor that felt ripped from modern Zelda. It wasn’t one homage – it was a collage.

That distinction matters. Palworld survived its own wave of “Pokémon with guns” outrage because, once you got past the memes, its creatures and mechanics were clearly its own work, sitting in a messy-but-defensible gray zone. Pickmos looked like it never aimed for that gray zone in the first place.

By mid-April, the mood around the game had shifted from eye-rolling to outright accusations of asset theft and plagiarism. You can still see the ghost of the Steam page on SteamDB, but the public-facing store listing is gone. For a game that hadn’t even launched, that’s a brutal early obituary.

NetworkGo is “supervising from a player’s perspective” — but this smells like lawyer time

On April 16, publisher NetworkGo stepped out from behind the curtain on the official Pickmos X account and essentially said: we’re taking the wheel.

Their public line is that they’ve “officially intervened” and will now supervise the Pickmos team “from a player’s perspective” to improve the game and address feedback. PocketGame, the developer, followed up by saying they’re revising the game to ensure a “controversy-free experience” and will re-release after NetworkGo signs off.

IGN also notes that NetworkGo says it’s investigating alleged stolen art before approving any return to Steam. That’s the tell. You don’t start talking about “controversy-free” builds and art investigations unless you’re very aware of two looming threats: platform policy and legal action.

If I had NetworkGo’s PR on the phone, the first question would be simple: At what point in this project did you realize how close these designs and systems were to existing IP — and why did it take public backlash for you to step in?

Because make no mistake, this intervention is not some altruistic “for the players” move. It’s brand triage. Publishers don’t want to be the company on the receiving end of Nintendo’s legal department for a game that hasn’t even shipped yet, especially not in a climate where “Pokémon clone” headlines travel fast and regulators are increasingly interested in platform oversight.

Steam’s clone problem finally met a controversy it couldn’t ignore

Valve has allowed a steady river of low-effort clones and asset flips onto Steam for years. That’s the backdrop here: under normal circumstances, a game like Pickmos might have just slipped into the pile and quietly launched to a few thousand curious players.

Instead, the Palworld moment changed the expectations game. Everyone’s watching this genre now — Nintendo, lawyers, players, and press. The survival-crafting + monster-collecting combo is hot, and with heat comes scrutiny.

What’s different with Pickmos is that the clampdown didn’t start with Valve or Nintendo sending a C&D. The publisher blinked first. The Steam store page disappeared not as a result of a lawsuit (at least, none we know about), but because the backlash and risk profile got too loud to ignore.

That sets a quiet but important precedent. If you’re an indie or AA team building “Palworld but closer to Pokémon” and hoping Steam’s usual laissez-faire approach will shield you, this is your wake-up call. If your publisher thinks you look like Exhibit A in a future infringement case, they now have a playbook: rip everything down, promise a cleaned-up relaunch, and hope everyone forgets the first version existed.

Can you retrofit originality into something built as a rip-off?

The most optimistic read is that Pickmos will come back genuinely transformed: redesigned monsters, new UI, systems that lean into a distinct identity instead of scavenging from whatever’s trending on Steam and on Nintendo hardware.

But here’s the uncomfortable question: if a project’s foundation was “what if we glued popular games together,” how much can you salvage by sanding off the serial numbers?

Reworking a handful of models isn’t enough when the core pitch is derivative. The overlap with Palworld’s survival-crafting structure, layered on top of Pokémon-style collecting and combat, was the selling point. Remove half of those reference points and what’s left? A generic survival game with mascots that suddenly have to carry their own weight.

There’s also the trust problem. Players already watched the name morph from Pikcmon to Pickmon to Pickmos as criticism ramped up. They saw the original designs. They saw the comparisons. Even if NetworkGo and PocketGame do the hard work and rebuild the art and systems, they’re now trying to relaunch a game whose first impression was “we tried to sneak a bootleg through and got caught.”

We’ve seen rescue attempts like this before in other genres — hero shooters that pivot, battle royale clones that strip out the most blatant copies — and very few of them ever escape their origin story. Once the narrative hardens around “shameless clone,” you don’t just need a better game; you need a reason for people to forgive the first version.

The real line between homage and rip-off just got clearer

This isn’t about declaring that nobody can ever make another monster-collector. Genres exist for a reason. But Pickmos is a clean case study in where the industry — and the audience — seems to be drawing the line post-Palworld.

Borrow the structure? Fine. Take the broad “catch, train, battle” loop and throw it into survival-crafting? Also fine. But stack multiple recognizable designs, nearly identical silhouettes, UI that feels one Ctrl+C away from another game, and social media receipts pointing to more direct lifts? That’s where players stop saying “inspired by” and start saying “rip-off.”

And once that happens, publishers like NetworkGo have a choice: double down and risk being made an example of, or pull the plug and hope to rebuild in relative quiet. With Pickmos, they chose the latter — which tells every other mid-tier publisher exactly how hot they think this stove is.

What to watch next

A few concrete signals will tell us whether Pickmos is a one-off embarrassment or the start of a broader clampdown on blatant clones:

• The next Pickmos reveal trailer (if it happens at all): are the monsters and UI visibly, radically different, or are we looking at a light reskin?
• NetworkGo’s final wording around the relaunch: do they acknowledge past mistakes, or quietly pretend the first version never existed?
• Any sign of legal action from major rights holders; even a quiet settlement would send a chill through the entire creature-collector scene.
• How other “Palworld-alikes” behave over the next year: if you start seeing name changes, delayed releases, and sudden redesigns, Pickmos will have been the canary.

My verdict: Pickmos as we first saw it is done. Whatever comes back under that name will effectively be a different game — and it’ll have to prove it deserves to exist as more than a Frankenstein of better ideas.

TL;DR

Monster-catching survival game Pickmos has been delisted from Steam after heavy backlash that it blatantly copied Pokémon, Palworld, and more. Publisher NetworkGo has stepped in, is now supervising developer PocketGame, and says the team is revising the game for a “controversy-free” relaunch while it investigates alleged stolen art. The real test will be whether a redesigned Pickmos can shed its clone reputation — or whether this becomes the new cautionary tale for anyone trying to ride Palworld’s wave without doing the work.