I don’t want to sound like too much of a fanboy, but I’ve owned every first-party device of theirs so far, even the old physical Steam Link, the OG Controller, and the Vive which I count as theirs, and they’ve consistently hit the sweet spot of what I want out of hardware:

No hostility to the user; very tinkerer friendly; a good balance of build quality, ergonomics, and features without going into diminishing returns; long-lasting software support (even the market failure of the Steam Link has recent firmware updates); forwarding wider Linux and gaming software ecosystems; etc.

At this point, I’m just grabbing them if I have even an occasional use case for them, and I don’t regret it one bit. My Frame comes in tomorrow, and I’m very excited.

Yep. Just stay away from the Meta headsets. They are cheaper than the competition for a reason.

If you want a less dark explanation, I think the toys are powered by both individual and collective imagination. Really popular toys like Buzz gain sentience immediately, because there are masses of children already thinking of them that way so much so that proximity isn’t needed. Non-toy items like Forky can gain toyhood and sentience from a concentrated dose of imagination. Most toys would be somewhere between those two extremes.

You could also go a step further and say collective imagination results in a lower quality sentience, explaining all the Buzzes, green aliens, etc. starting out less self-aware.