Games are a realtime application, so there's always a performance target and some performance work unless the game is very simple. All professional game developers are conscious of performance to some extent.

On the other hand, games are not hard-realtime - if the framerate sometimes drops below the target or there's the occasional stall, not all teams will care enough or be able to fix that.

In my post above I was talking from the perspective of going the extra mile and trying to make performance really good, which not all games do.

Ah I understand, so in the circumstance you're thinking of it does generally run quite well, but there might be hitches or areas of lower performance that would take a bit more work to get performing perfectly. Without someone directly responsible for those areas as that are changes hands a few times no doubt, eventually it's reached launch time and no one took responsibility.

I recently started working with a large organization and it's made me empathize with how these behemoth pieces of work can miss seemingly obvious issues. People probably noticed, but no one did anything about it since it wasn't in their work stream anymore.

The minimum performance target is usually 30fps (more common) or 60fps (less common) as that's all that a consoles budget usually allows. All you need is one thread that comes in just under 32ms on a PS4, but maybe doesn't scale all that well. For example, it's a task that's heavily memory bandwidth or latency bound, which isn't really all that much better on modern top-end desktops. Bam, now you have both a "badly optimized" game and one in which all performance targets are achieved.

Which is not really all that unlikely of a scenario. Just look at the absurd gains that the 5800X3D achieves in some engines over the 5800X, despite the X3D running at lower clock speeds. GTA 5 is a good example here ( https://youtu.be/hBFNoKUHjcg?t=885 ) - the 5800X3D achieves the highest fps on that at 171, a staggering 40 fps higher than the 5800X (by comparison the 12900K is 154fps). Something about that engine just slams into a memory bandwidth/latency wall, at which point it just stops scaling.