FWIW, I'm also coming out of the game dev world, and we shipped all our games with (custom) asserts enabled (which includes bounds checking in containers). I did regular performance tests and the enabled asserts were never a big enough performance hit to justify removing them (around 1..3% across an entire frame), the ability to get 'clean' crash reports from out in the wild, triggered by asserts instead of random segfaults was more than worth it (we also had special 'hot path asserts' which were not included in the release builds though, but those were rarely used). The only downside is that the executable gets around 25% bigger (and easier to reverse engineer) because of all the embedded assert-condition strings - but I guess this could have been solved differently (since we were using our own assert macros anyway).