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This is an awesome article, thanks a lot for writing it! Especially performance requirements are something that I feel like people seem to dismiss sometimes. Like 32 bit not being supported in RenPy 8 anymore ;_;

There's by the way an interesting dilemma of optimizing disc space vs. performance requirements in Titanfall that might interest you. Since uncompressed audio labors the CPU less, they decided to go for uncompressed audio to make it playable on weaker hardware. On the other hand that meant that instead of 3-6 GB, the audio ended up taking up 35 GB, which was bad for people with small hard drives.

One note regarding audio that I'd like to add is that using opus instead of ogg decreases the audio file size by even more.  The trade-off is that opus labors the CPU slightly more than ogg. The CPU labor increase is usually irrelevant for most VNs made in RenPy, though, unless the game already has features that labor the CPU a lot.

Yes, that's a great point! A bit sad to hear that Renpy 8 is fully 64-bit now T_T

It's super fascinating when concerns of accessibility lead to tradeoffs like in the case of the uncompressed audio. I guess if I had made the game, I would have tried to offer two versions so that players can make an informed choice on which will suit their hardware best? But I'm sure they considered that and there were other technical obstacles in the way. It may explain why a lot of high-fidelity modern games are so huge, now that I think about it.

Thank you so much for sharing! <3