How far do you have to optimise a Video-Game?

I like playing Video-Games. I even liked it so much that i wanted to go from just playing a Video-Game to developing my own. I had and still have some projects I worked on. But when developing I suddenly asked myself: How far do you have to optimise a Video-Game?

Optimising a Video-Game first sounds like a very good Idea. You can reach a larger player base more easily, the size of the game files will probably be smaller, etc.... . But in reality you probably won't got the time and money to achieve it. Because optimising a game takes a lot of effort. You will be searching for a lot short comes just for a slight improvement in the framerate. And these shortcuts can destroy some part of your code in the long run. If you want to start optimising your game, i would suggest to start at the earliest point you can. Even then you have to consider the money factor. It may seems to you like I don't want you to optimise your game, I don't want to hold you back from that, I think optimising a game is a wonderful thing more of the BIG Video-Game-Companies should do. Anyway, the money factor. When you are a small indie-Game-Company you have to look out where how much money you spent on the different parts of the game. The triple A Game developers have the resources to optimise their games, but their clientele (most of the time) already have a stacked out PC. They then do not have to optimise their games beyond a certain point, because they already satisfied the greatest part of their costumers. You could see this happen when Cyberpunk was released. Only when the public outraged, they started reworking on the game and optimising it to the playable point.

All in all I think a lot of these company's could work a little bit more on optimising their games. It not only would let them reach a larger audience, but then you wouldn't have the constant feeling that if you don't have the newest CPU or GPU you cannot enjoy these games at their fullest.