Niantic as well (sad Peridot cries in the distance)

Yeah i'm also a bit surprised that "virtual pets" aren't larger today.

Maybe i just don't follow the gaming market enough but games with a simple interface, with a creature that you care for, that grows and lives 24/7 and that can "do things" with other creatures seems like quite the market.

Many people find the "character creator" and just "walking around a aimlessly" in games the most interesting thing, and spend little time playing the actual game.

Maybe these things have been explored in the crossovers between VR Chat, Pokemon Go, Spore, Animal Crossing etc.

Pou was (is?) paradoxically one of those highly popular games that noone has ever heard of - with half a billion downloads on the play store back in 2014+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pou_(video_game)

I think they're becoming a bit of a fad again. Many streamers I follow have been obsessing over them recently (granted that they're mostly not zoomers, just millennials enjoying some nostalgia).

The current 90s nostalgia wave is pretty interesting as a late 80s/early 90s millennial. The zoomers brought it back into the zeitgeist, and we are still young and hip enough to be interested in the trend, but we were actually there the first time round!

I wonder if this is what boomers/old gen x felt like when 70's hippy fashion/culture was the fad back in the late 90's/early 2000's.

Tinfoil hat theory: it's actually not an accident. Every kind of cultural thing appears twice, at a fixed offset of about 3 generations. First time around it's the original that captures the hearts of a given group and gets them to spend money. The second time around, it hits the purses of those same people, this time just banking on nostalgia.

I don't think it's any more complex or sinister than the fact that rehashing old content or look/vibe/sound is cheaper and easier than coming up with entirely new ideas.

Just look at movies and music over the last 5-10 years, it's mostly remakes, reboots, covers, and extensions of existing 'universes'.

Yes, I'm looking at the movies and shows over the last 5-10 years, and they aren't remaking and rebooting arbitrary older works - they're rebooting the specific stuff that the current most-spending generation grew up with.

I'm not saying it's sinister, but more that it's a plausible outcome of optimizing for profit.

The newest model (Tamagotchi Uni) just dropped a few months ago, so that probably explains the uptick in interest.

Tamagotchis never exactly 'went away' except for a few years between the late 90s and early 2000s. They've actually been making new models pretty steadily every few years. Although not all of them make it out of Japan.