When Palworld sold 12 million Steam copies in under two weeks, two things felt like they'd become inevitable: First, that Nintendo's lawyers would take any opening they could find to punish Pocketpair for daring to release what many had been calling Pokemon: Gun Version well before its launch, and second, that we'd eventually see Palworld prompt its own imitators with hopes of pulling off a similar smash hit.
While Nintendo threw down the lawsuit gauntlet within a year of Palworld's launch, the nature of videogame development timelines meant that if a new subgenre was spinning up, it'd be a bit longer before we saw the evidence. With the kickoff of the latest Steam Next Fest, however, it seems the time has finally come. The age of the Palworld-like is upon us.
