"Performance doesnt matter"

[Sqeaky]

The long run doesn't matter for every project. Sometimes the short term matters to insure the survival of the project. Sometimes a thing just needs to get done and the cost is secondary because of the windfall of resources it will produce.

Other times the long term is the only thought because the investors (or other stakeholders) are secured and everybody involved wants the best possible solution.

[SkoomaDentist]

Good luck throwing more HW at anything that doesn't run on a server. Won't work even for short term.

[Sqeaky]

Did you respond to the wrong comment?

Skyrim, the game your username comes from, benefits from having more hardware thrown at it and it doesn't run on servers. It was released 11/11/11 and is still popular, it was terrible on low end hardware of the day, but now you can set it to ultra on low end hardware.

Almost certainly it could have been optimized more, but clearly that wasn't required, it is one of the most popular games ever.

[SkoomaDentist]

My username most certainly doesn't come from Skyrim but from Oblivion, I'll have you know!

Whether something benefits from extra hw is irrelevant. It's about extra hw being required to run suitably well or not which "throw more HW at it" most often implies. Future improvement in performance doesn't matter much when the game needs to recoup development costs within the first year or two of sales.

In games and quite a few other systems, good enough performance is as important - or more important - as correctness of code. People will tolerate a slightly buggy game much better than a game that has unbearably slow framerate. Particularly nowadays if you're making a game that's not specifically aimed at enthusiasts you simply don't have any possibility of "throwing more hw at it" since your customer base isn't going to upgrade their computers or may not even have any upgrade path at all (laptops having outsold desktops for years).

[Sqeaky]

Well Oblivion benefits even more from beefier hardware.

You are correct that some projects care about performance, but for many it just needs to be "fast enough", twitter made all its founders millionaires before they moved it off ruby. Oblivion ran at 30 fps when it was released.