[flohofwoe]

Even with an extreme high level of inhouse testing (which is needed anyway) you'll never find the bugs that are discovered when a hundred-thousand gamers try to exploit every little feature of your game.

The reason to keep asserts in release mode is so that when one of those asserts is triggered "out in the wild" the bug investigation is dramatically simplified. The assert message and callstack is usually enough to figure out what went wrong. With a regular crash that happens without asserts the actual reason of the crash may already be obfuscated enough that a useful bug diagnosis is no longer possible. E.g. an assert is usually triggered very close to the bug, while crashes are usually only the end result of a whole cascade of events triggered by an initial bug.

[bluGill]

Fair, but the counter is eventually you have enough real world testing to have confidence and so you no longer need the assert. If 1 in 10 user's have a crash that is unacceptable. However, what if it's only one in a million, or one in ten billion? At what point can you say, 'it's no longer worth worrying about that rare case.'

And this is why games are different from medical devices. In medical devices, I would worry anyway. In games, especially in a tight loop, it may be that extra CPU instruction is an important difference in performance.