Assuming that the pets are side rewards that can be purchased with in-game currency, would you feel underwhelmed or disappointed if they were purely cosmetic in that they just follow the player around without any additional functionality? They could have cute little animations but still no impact on core gameplay.
I remember when I was younger I only cared if the pet looked cool, but maybe that isn’t reflective of today’s expectations?
They are just cosmetic, some pets enhance the game such as giving stat boosts.
For example: Cool pet gives 2.4X your stats if you own it
But if they don’t do that then they are just pure cosmetic such as Adopt me pets.
This really depends on what type of game you have. Simulators need pets to give bonuses, and help you progress, while role plays can do with just the cosmetic aspect of them.
This heavily reflects on the type of game you have, and whether or not it’s competitive enough to make the pet desirable in a player’s eyes.
For instance, a legendary Ender Dragon pet in Hypixel Skyblock is one of the most desired, hard to get pets in the game, because of its abilities to improve weapons and increase stats marginally. Players fight for every edge, no matter how small.
On the other hand, we can take a look at Pokemon and we can see players spend ridiculous amounts of time on a bike just doing the same thing to get a recolor.
Personally I feel like you should keep it simple and not have an OMEGA VOLCANIC RAINBOW HYPERSPACE DEEPFRIED DRAGON REQUIEM since those games tend to lose the values in pets and make people unincentivized to purchase anything limited edition.
If you could provide more details about the game, we’ll probably have better insight on whether or not people will desire cosmetics in said game and whether or not you should attach abilities to it.