Let’s be honest here. The original series was on arcades and you had to get from point A to point B. For the current generation of gamers this is the equivalent of a mini-game you play on the loading screen of the main game. I’m not defending the GaaS shit, but what did you guys expect?

Ark with all its DLCs somehow manages to be bigger than this.

Quite possible, yeah haha

Tons of legacy devices. Old car infotainment systems, old “smart” TVs, old players that don’t have Rockbox ports, etc.

Opus is an insanely efficient codec, but unfortunately not very compatible.

If I had infinite storage, for archival I’d preferably use FLAC at its default level 5 compression. But like you and others, I thought the file sizes were quite big for a sizeable collection. So my personal compromise was AAC at 256kbps encoded with Apple’s QAAC. It’s small in size, vastly superior to MP3, and almost as universally compatible as MP3. There’s a reason why iTunes has stuck with it for so long, it’s an incredible encoder. I would never be able to hear a difference compared to lossless, at least on my equipment. So I went with it.