The latest Steam Next Fest features a pile of Palworld-likes as witches and airships battle over the creature-collecting survival subgenre

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...