You seem to be overlooking the part where I said "too hefty."
I'm not just throwing out an opinion here, I'm saying what I've seen first-hand.
I've had some insider knowledge on 4 games to varying degrees, and one of them saw a drop of several hundred dollars in their Patreon monthly income when their mobile release got too much for older mobile devices to handle. There were a few mobile users that claimed the game still worked fine and it had playtested okay but there was a loud number of players saying the game wouldn't install or would blackscreen on launch etc. a compressed version worked but it was a temp fix so changes had to be made going forward.
Several hundred dollars might not seem a lot when you compare it to some of the big games but it was probably close to a quarter of everything that game was making at the time.
I've seen games that started out with excessive amounts of animation right down to idle animations on regular conversation parts that have had to retroactively go back and swap them all out with stills just because the android version can't handle them.
I've also seen devs try to handle this by making a separate lighter weight version for mobile with more compressed images and foregoing the animations but by then they're basically working on two games at once and it slows them down. More complaints. So the standard solution seems to be to just streamline, and if you want a mobile release the desktop version will suffer from the same restrictions for the dev's and the release schedule's convenience.
Again, I'm not saying devs will completely ignore or avoid animations for the sake of their mobile player base because, as I said, the tag is too attractive to ditch them completely. I'm saying that devs can't be as creative with their use of animations as maybe they want to be if they want to sell to the largest number of people possible. Animations are still commonplace on major event pieces, namely the actual sex in an ero game, but too many and they cause problems so they get used more sparingly.
I'm not arguing with you about whether RenPy games can have animations or use them well etc. I'm talking from a purely business-minded standpoint. There are plenty of RenPy games that are desktop only (with attempted fan ports maybe) that go ham with animations. But anyone trying to make this their job is gonna want to take even the vocal minorities seriously if they want to get anywhere.
It's worth noting that 2D toon aesthetic titles can get away with more by the way. Fewer colours and lower resolutions are required to allow the visuals to shine etc. so while I'm pointing out animations can be a problem I'm thinking purely about titles that try to push their visuals as many Daz-using devs do. Games like Summertime Saga could probably push the number of animations a heck of a lot further before causing anyone problems.
I don't want to talk all this shop though. I want more LocJaw images
but here's the thing, do you really, genuinely belive unity would be lighter on an older mobile device than ren'py? not questioning you, but genuine curiosity, specially with how heavy unity games are becoming, i would imagine that, unless we are talking some really heavy spaghetti here, unity would be more problematic to run on those than ren'py.
