UNCATCHABLE

 Why has no indie riffon POKÉMON taken off on PC?

- Jessica Reyes

Stardew Valley is the golden child of farming sims. Inspired by Nintendo’s Harvest Moon, it’s gone on to sell more than 20 million copies since 2016 and kicked off a torrent of imitators on PC. Why haven’t we had that moment for the monster-taming genre? Pokémon clones are abundant, but none have had a sliver of Stardew Valley’s success, yet alone Pokémon’s. If there’s a formula for reimagining classic Japanese series as modern indies, monster tamers haven’t found it.

“An RPG where [players] can create their own adventure based on the characters they know is of course appealing,” say Jochem and Marcel, the indie developers behind this year’s Coromon. The challenge for indies is, “Players would often rather stay with what they know than trying out new games,” they say.

There have been some modestly successful Pokémon clones like MMO Temtem, which made headlines last year when it reached 500,000 copies sold in one month on Steam Early Access. Coromon passed 100,000 sales on PC and Mac, and the Nintendo Switch version has undoubtedly added to that. Yet that’s just a fraction of Pokémon Sword & Shield’s 24.5 million.

Eric Barone liberally based Stardew Valley on Harvest Moon, but it has now surpassed its inspiration in popularity and sales. Temtem game director Guillermo Andrades says that Pokémon, by comparison, casts a long, long shadow. “Right now there’s a lot of reticence towards the games of the genre that are not