I had a Tamagotchi, but it was the original Digimon toys that I was really obsessed with. I got my friend into it too so that I had someone to battle with. We were even raising them in class. We had all sorts of hypotheses about what made them stronger, which were probably based on no real evidence. I had a bulking-cutting strategy where I force fed my 'mon to increase its weight and then trained it until it reached the minimum weight for its rank.
I picked up an anniversary digivice a few years ago, I should replace the battery and raise some more digimon.
The new Digimon ones are apparently ridiculously cool, I have one of the "X" models but haven't really taken the time to mess with it yet. My one buddy has been crazy about them though, trying to buy every version of it (a pretty even mix between collectors reasons, and loving playing with them)
It's absolutely mad to me that Sonic Team have done nothing with this since SA2: Battle.
I hate to say it, but it's literally built for mobile devices! Have a Chao Garden game on consoles/PC, have them be downloadable onto your mobile device, and basically turn it into a Pokémon Go type thing where you can get kids and weebs to exercise and explore the outdoors.
Kind of sort of? It's exclusive to that watch for one thing which is pretty damn limiting. But it doesn't have like The kind of online features I dream about in a chao game. Like imagine the kindergarten from that but it's completely online you drop it off in an online class with other peoples and it can learn from them as well or something like that.
The (maybe?) newest ones, the Tamagotchi Unis, had some special versions come out that kind of have a "DLC" that changes the Tamagotchi a bit. Like, there's a monster themed one, but it's really just a normal Uni that gets a new monster location and adds new Tama chains for what they can grow into. I say dlc because it comes with the card when you buy the monster Tamagotchi, but you can also get the code to change any of the units into a monster one.
Id take aesthetic DLC over NFTs and micro transactions any day, so I'd say it's pretty cool still