Why are so many multi-pets so awful?

One of my goals in this hobby is to collect penguin virtual pets, and since there aren't as many dedicated virtual pets as you'd expect for a "charismatic" animal species, this means that I'm often left looking into multi-pets, new and old. After all, there seem to be more multi-pets that feature penguins than dedicated ones!

Lately, this has left me wondering something, though: Just why are so many multi-pets so incredibly bad? I know that there are older ones that are pretty good, particularly from back in the old days when virtual pets were a brand-new toy category, but there seems to have been a distinct point where multi-pets became universally terrible. As far as I can tell, it looks like this occurred during the very late 1990s or the early 2000s. Why did this happen?

A quick attemp on cashing in on the virtual pet craze without making any effort, I think.

Jhud said:

A quick attemp on cashing in on the virtual pet craze without making any effort, I think.

Click to expand...

That's the conclusion that I've drawn, too, but one thing still puzzles me: There was good multi-pet logic doing the rounds for years before the bad ones showed up. It even appeared in virtual pets with obscure origins, but for some reason at some point it was decided that new software that was just plain bad was necessary, instead.

It's totally weird.

I think the main difference is either known or at least niche but good companies pitching on the craze vs cheap knockoff companies doing it... When an actually decent company wanted to make a multi pet probably a few months have passed before its release, and most likely the craze has calmed down by then, making the toy pretty rare due to it's obscurity. On the other hand the cheap knockoff companies probably wanted to prevent this, cranking out a cheap mess with the finished product being done even in one month.