Is animation rigging more costly than regular animations?

I don't know if anyone else encountered this, but when I tried applying large amounts of animation rigging to 50+ characters in my game, it seems performance shot way down due to that. But I'm unsure if this is due to the animation rigging or perhaps something I wasn't accounting for.

Has anyone experienced this or have any pro-tips for how to use animation-

 

you can't really have deforming character animations without using 3D models that have and use a rig.
in the quality settings you can change the number of skin weights (i think by default it is set to 4) this setting controls how many bones can influence each vertex so lowering it can increase performance but can reduce quality of animations. another thing you could look at is optimizing your character rig to have fewer bones overall/ make sure it doesn't have bones for the fingers if not needed, etc.

 

Not sure how light your game needs to be, but It must be something else.
Still there's an option to optimize an animated character in the import options.
Check this link, but notice probably is not the rigging what's causing the issue:
https://learn.unity.com/tutorial/rig-optimization-for-mobile#5fe520d4edbc2a7ca4374c35

 

I just realized that unity has this feature called "Animation Rigging" now. This is probably what you meant. It is for IK and procedural animations right?
So yes, I can totally imagine how using this on many characters at the same time is heavier than using conventional animations. The things I suggested in my post above are still true and could increase your performance if that is your bottle-neck.
I think the name of this feature is less than ideal and confusing because it is way too general, haha.