Gaming

Tbf even the gau-8 used by the A-10 warthog only has 18 seconds of brrrrrrt. So if anything carryable could last 5 seconds, you'd basically be out of ammo anyways. It's a way of making it "realistic" without limiting you to the point of making it worthless. Which in reality, in any extended engagement, a ground mini-gun is absolutely worthless. No one person by themselves could use that gun effectively against more than ~10-15 people and only in VERY specific situations. Only in a kamikaze rush would it be of any value. I'd take 3 marksmen with bolt action rifles and iron sights over one dude on foot with a mini-gun all day, every day.

Mini-guns are very, very good in specific applications, but absolutely worthless in others. But it's fun in a video game to weird. It'd be unrealistic and OP to carry with enough ammo to make it useful outside of fallout power armor, or a full mech.

TIL, that rotary machines guns spin to cool down.

Bringing back the trauma of Breath of the Wild where melee weapons break after a few hits.

If you have a minigun and not enough enemies on screen not to need it running constantly, you're doing it wrong.

Or better, dual miniguns.

Same with flashlight batteries in horror games

Or weapon degregation in any game... Sorry this METAL weapon can't be used for more then a few minutes?

It's the same for weapon ranges. Assault rifles have an effective range of more than 300m IRL, but it's commonly less than 100m in video games