Have you seen the new Pokémon/Palworld/Overwatch/Honkai/Zelda ripoff? It’s called Pickmon. Goodness, it’s a doozy. You have to watch this trailer. It’s hilarious.
When Pocketpair announced Palworld, it was clearly a Pokémon ripoff. Pickmon rose from its stool, handed Palworld its beer, and fluffed its jacket.
This is why Nintendo sues everyone. Nintendo’s IPs are as valuable to them as Mickey Mouse is to Disney. You don’t touch them. It’s only a matter of time before Nintendo sues PocketGame (they misspelled their own name in the trailer). But this situation leads to an interesting player issue that Nintendo has yet to address.
This is the second Pokémon knockoff in two years. Developers like Pocketpair and PocketGame see an opportunity and are communicating something: people want Pokémon to grow up.
The references are just too blatant.
I mentioned this in my newsletter last week (create a free membership to read). I appreciate that Game Freak has stuck to its gameplay principles and its young audience. 30 years later, their commitment paid off as my own daughter is playing and learning to read. But I wish Pokémon’s gameplay had grown up with me. Others seem to want this, supported by the almost 28,000 players on Steam as of writing, a 40K 24-hour peak, and over 2 million who have checked it out. The idea of mature Pokémon is interesting to people—of all ages. Nintendo should try it.
Normally, if a company can fill a market gap, it's an advantage. In this case, it's a cry. No one can compete, so people desperately create something themselves. But Pokémon is too dominant, too unique, and too good. It’s impossible to create any creature-catching-anything without invoking Pokémon. But Palworld and Pickmon add survival or crafting mechanisms, which ground and intensify the idea of traveling a world and catching creatures. If Nintendo released a Pokémon game that allowed crafting and open-world PvP, there would be no need for Palworld or Pickmon. Those games are not doing anything so unique that they’re going to eat The Pokémon Company’s lunch.
There’s an argument that the demand for a grounded Pokémon isn’t enough to justify it—2 million is a drop in the bucket for Game Freak. But do we know how many people would start playing it just because it’s Pokémon? It could be bigger. We don’t know.
I don’t want to suggest Nintendo is leaving money on the table. I don’t know if we’re there yet. But it’s clear, based on the response these knockoffs keep generating—beyond the shock value—people want mature, grounded Pokémon gameplay. Nintendo could pull it off. They should go for it.
