Tamagotchi/Digimon still puts out keychain-sized hardware V-pets from time to time, though aside from DM20 none of the modern Digimon ones ever see a NA release.
Pokemon Go is the juggernaut in mobile space ever since they added the "Buddy Adventure" stuff. I don't know of any other popular games with "pet" mechanics, though, since I don't play mobile games and don't pay much attention to what's happening in mobile space.
On console/PC, pet games are considered a bit of a shovelware genre but they definitely exist and have players, even if they never reach the point of being considered "popular". There was a "horse game" blogger I was following for a while who would review specifically games about raising, training, breeding, and racing horses. Unfortunately, all of these games are pretty bad, as their audience isn't taken seriously enough by publishers to treat them with respect, so the games are made as cheaply and with as many corners cut as possible, with the goal of getting a new product on physical store shelves every holiday cycle. Pet games appear to be an untapped, under-served market, but established game dev studios don't appear to consider this market worth the risk developing for.
Then you occasionally see an indie game which is at least adjacent to the genre. Your Slime Rancher, or Niche. A single-player experience on the PC has to be designed very differently to hold people's attention, so there's way more to do in the game itself but less of a social/economy experience that the petsites have. There are so many cool ideas and abandoned genres that indies attempt to use and revive, but, the problem is that indie devs as a group are largely not experienced enough or lack the resources to execute them properly (the exceptions, the "indie hits", are so uncommon that they prove the rule here). Still, I think out of all the groups mentioned, an indie dev is most likely to figure out a good, popular pet game eventually.
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Re: Pet sites
(Anonymous) 2022-02-14 06:25 pm (UTC)(link)Pokemon Go is the juggernaut in mobile space ever since they added the "Buddy Adventure" stuff. I don't know of any other popular games with "pet" mechanics, though, since I don't play mobile games and don't pay much attention to what's happening in mobile space.
On console/PC, pet games are considered a bit of a shovelware genre but they definitely exist and have players, even if they never reach the point of being considered "popular". There was a "horse game" blogger I was following for a while who would review specifically games about raising, training, breeding, and racing horses. Unfortunately, all of these games are pretty bad, as their audience isn't taken seriously enough by publishers to treat them with respect, so the games are made as cheaply and with as many corners cut as possible, with the goal of getting a new product on physical store shelves every holiday cycle. Pet games appear to be an untapped, under-served market, but established game dev studios don't appear to consider this market worth the risk developing for.
Then you occasionally see an indie game which is at least adjacent to the genre. Your Slime Rancher, or Niche. A single-player experience on the PC has to be designed very differently to hold people's attention, so there's way more to do in the game itself but less of a social/economy experience that the petsites have. There are so many cool ideas and abandoned genres that indies attempt to use and revive, but, the problem is that indie devs as a group are largely not experienced enough or lack the resources to execute them properly (the exceptions, the "indie hits", are so uncommon that they prove the rule here). Still, I think out of all the groups mentioned, an indie dev is most likely to figure out a good, popular pet game eventually.