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Being a community manager for any videogame must mean your DMs are a perpetual nightmare of notifications, but that’s doubly so if you’ve ever stared down the barrel of a particularly litigious industry powerhouse. When you’re the community manager for a game like Palworld, I reckon that’s just a Monday.
In this case, it really was just last Monday when fans rushed to tell the Palworld Head of Publishing & Communications, John “Bucky” Buckley, about a newly announced creature-collecting adventure called Pickmon—if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t worry. It looks exactly how it sounds. But if you’re still curious, head on over to Steam.
The Pickmon announcement took off just as Bucky was some 40,000 feet in the air on a plane to the 2026 Game Developers Conference (GDC). Once at the conference, Palworld’s publishing and communications head sat down for an interview with PC Gamer, and my colleague Christopher Livingston asked Bucky if he’d had a chance to see Pickmon and the comparisons fans were making to not just Pokémon, but also Palworld.
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The circumstance meant he hadn’t had much time to look into Pickmon—airplane mode and all that air safety jazz—but he did know about it thanks to Palworld fans eager to tell him about Pickmon’s existence.
“Unfortunately, this was dropped on the world when I was 40,000 feet in the sky flying to San Francisco,” said Bucky. “And I landed, connected my eSIM, and had about 8,000 Discord messages from Palworld fans who wanted me to know about this. God bless their little hearts.”
I would’ve turned my eSIM right back off, but Bucky laughed and seemed far more enthused by the flood of messages from Palworld’s community. As for Pickmon, there’s a lot he simply doesn’t know, and that’s true for most of us right now.
“Look, you know, full disclosure, I’m not lying. I’m being very, very honest. I genuinely haven’t had the time to properly have a look into it. I mean, from what I looked at very briefly, there’s no background on the studio or anything. So there’s obviously some circumstance that needs to be discovered about this.”
Bucky’s not wrong—there’s just not much out there about Pickmon or its developer, PocketGame. The only thing you’ll easily find in abundance on Pickmon are reactions to its debut trailer, and oh man, is it ever a doozy. My colleague Lincoln summed it up well in his reporting on the creature collector, but when he said, “Pickmon is doing knockoffs of knockoffs. We’ve reached knockoff singularity,” I felt that.
We haven’t seen anything from Nintendo about the new Pokémon clone either, but I wouldn’t have expected much noise from its legal team by now anyway. We know it’s willing to sue over its Pokémon patents, and it’s already started that long, messy process with Palworld.
Perhaps we’ll learn more soon enough, but I’m sure Bucky won’t have any trouble staying in the loop when it comes to more Pokémon or Pokémon-adjacent announcements.
“You know, whether it’s someone under a secret name, or whether it’s a studio of a studio, or whether it is just some small unity team, I don’t know,” said Bucky. “I watched the trailer. Definitely had a chuckle. And I’m sure when I return to Japan, someone’s going to talk to me about it.”
