[avinium]

Oh, I do think performance matters - but that's usually only once you've discovered your underlying market. Minecraft's audience clearly didn't care about performance, so it would have been wasted effort to optimize in the early days.

That being said, I agree that performance might actually be integral to your product. Quake 3, for example, probably would have bombed if everyone was playing sub-10fps.

Either way, the priority is "figure out who wants your product and why." That helps determine when and where to focus your optimization efforts.