The export in HTML5 is already very cool, and maybe sufficent for many to distribute games, but I was thinking it could be cool to be able to include pico-8 into some raspberry pi distributions (some with several retro gaming consoles emulators, like retropie, recalbox, happi game center), with the -splore option you get a great gaming machine!

Since pico-8 is not freely redistribuable, why not having a free pico-8 "player", which could play and splore games?

This is an interesting idea, but there's a small problem: How would the player stay up-to-date? As far as I know, PICO-8 doesn't have an auto-updater.

It could always come with one.

Alternatively, being able to provide a simple redistributable player version of a cart would mean not having to update it because the cart and player versions would always match.

The standalone already exist as Zep released a Pico8 demo with a pico8.exe that only run the demo: http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=66974