[eru]

You are right about them. But battery hungry monsters ain't new. Have a look at the Sega Game Gear.

The Game Gear had much higher specs than Nintendo's Game Boy. It had a proper colour display, instead of a pea soup screen.

> The internal reaction to the Game Boy at Nintendo was initially very poor, earning it the derogatory nickname "DameGame" from Nintendo employees, in which dame (だめ) means "hopeless" or "useless".[19][20]

(An idiomatic translation might be, 'Lame Boy'.)

As you might be aware, the supposed Lame Boy won the market. Partially because the Game Gear ate through batteries like crazy, while the Game Boy subsisted on a more measured diet.