That’s also a good question.

I personally wouldn’t compress pixel art—the artist presumably placed each pixel pretty intentionally so I wouldn’t wanna do anything to mess with that. By pixel art’s nature it’s gonna be low resolution anyway, so storage and sample time are unlikely to be a concern.

Pixel art is also a special case in that it’s very unlikely you need to do a bake step where you downsize or generate mipmaps or such. As a result, using an interchange format here could actually be reasonable.

If I was shipping a pixel art title I’d probably decide based on load times. If the game loads instantly with whichever approach you implement first then it doesn’t matter. If it’s taking time to load the textures, then I’d check which approach loads faster. It’s not obvious a priori which that would be without measuring—it depends on whether the bottleneck is decoding or reading from the filesystem.