I ported John Earnest's Octo variant to an ESP32 cheap yellow display (CYD) board, loading many of the examples from the archive: https://github.com/codekulturbonn/espocto
Yesterday I tried to power up my pocket chip, but after years in dust of my dad basement the screen does not light, now try sshing and see if anything is running or die
The pocket chip it been revolutionary but waiting 2 years to receive lost all the time to been completive with other plataforms
I wouldn't expect "much added value" in the first place, because I expect those gigabytes to go into texture (or video) resolution. So I wouldn't be disappointed by the results.
And the raw impact of a game being that big is that I have to tie up a few dollars of drive space while it's installed. That's annoying but only a little bit. It's on par with the game costing $1-2 more.
What leads you to "give up"? You're phrasing it as if the gameplay gets worse when the art team gets bigger, and I don't get it.
Approaching 50 years old, I have grown alongside the games industry, before getting my Timex 2068, I had several Game & Watch handelds.
Followed by PC and Amiga gaming, GameGear, PlayStation 2 (including PS2Linux), nowadays focused on mobile gaming, and PC.
Those hundreds of GBs, not only require shelling out for a desktop, that desktop unless I want to build it myself, it most likely going to be an aquarium of some sort, for whatever reason that is cool. It is like having auto-tuning at home.
Gaming laptops, only fix the size part, their design and weight is also not something I would want to carry around, unless I would be traveling into a LAN party, and those are no longer a thing. Plus they are basically transportable desktops, as they need to be plugged to play anything juicy.
Prices for game console drives take advantage of their proprietary nature, also a no go.
Finally I don't have endless amount of hours to finish a game, nor am I willing to pay for AAA prices, they seem to correlate with amount of GB that they take.
So as someone playing electronic games since the 1980's, there is tons of options out there, and I don't have FOMO, it is about having fun for half an hour, an hour, whatever.
Watching a few YouTube session, reading about them on Gamasutra, EDGE, MCV Develop, or GDC Vault sessions, already covers what latests AAA are all about.
There's plenty of games with big installs that have been out for years and can run on a steam deck or less. Which means lots of light laptops can run them too. I don't think your ideas here about desktops and laptops are true.
For consoles, PS5 doesn't have proprietary drives, that's just Xbox. And both Xbox and PlayStation let you export games onto any cheap USB drive to make room on the internal storage.
If price and hours correlate with GBs in a bad way, those are fair reasons to skip a game, but it's just confusing if you frame it as a criticism of the GBs.
To put it bluntly, if I can have my hour of fun with an 100 MB indie game, I am not going to install a 300 GB game, regardless of how cool it might be.
And there are enough of those around, than what I have time to play the rest of my life.
Additionally I can keep myself busy enough playing Quazatron rounds or similar.
How about a different scenario. Nether one is an indie game, so it's apples to apples. A 1GB game is $25 and a 200GB game is $20. They both look similarly fun. Do you consider getting the bigger one?
