I think the priority should be weighted by the time.

If you can optimise game loading and reduce it by 1 minute, or increase FPS by 0.01%, would you still choose the latter?

Trite example obviously but the gta v loading issue was so bad. Decades of human time unnecessarily spent on loading screens.

Substantial revenue opportunity missed because you can't buy microtransactions during a loading screen.

I think in the GTAV case, they kind of dropped the ball by not doing profiling when players complained. The exact same thing happened to our game as well, it was also a Json deserializing library that caused the problem. At the first release, the player’s save files were small, so we didn’t notice the library was written poorly. After several expansions, the save data grew, some players contacted support complaining about start up loading time. We did a profile, found the culprit, migrated data to Bson format, done.

Back to the question. If there is a limited amount of time before release and I have to choose between fixing load time and fixing framerate. It’s definitely going to be framerate, some console platforms will reject your title if you frame drop multiple times within certain duration. Frame drop is also a deal breaker for most players especially for VR games. Stuttering can cause serious motion sickness in VR and make people throw up.

Overall I think the constraints of game projects are different to other domains like web and business. So we game developers tend to think differently. Like bugs are bad, but as long as not game breaking/save corrupting or happening way too often, players are kind of ok with that. People even found bugs in game entertaining and compiled a weekly reel of bugs https://kotaku.com/c/video/highlight-reel. On the other hand, performance is critical to us, if a game plays sluggish then no one can enjoy it. Compared to the web where users have more tolerance about rending speed.

It's definitely not as binary as my brief post made out. During my (fairly brief) stint in gamedev, we prioritized issues using an "impact factor" which tried to combine all the different aspects of how an issue could impact players into a single metric. I'm not sure what the final formula was but it would have been something like:

    impact = severity_factor * frequency * age_factor

where

    severity_factor = 1   (minor cosmetic/performance issue)
                    = 3   (major cosmetic/performance issue)
                    = 5   (annoying gameplay bug)
                    = 50  (avoidable crash/gamebreaking bug)
                    = 100 (unavoidable crash/gamebreaking bug)
    frequency       = times_occurred / hours_of_gameplay
    age_factor      = 1 + age_in_months

It’s not just a player facing thing either. Substantial loading times can really hurt iteration speed for developers. It’s kinda sad to see fellow game developers defend it as a low priority when it really, really shouldn’t be.