Tbf I, as a software developer, find inefficient or unoptimized software to be unethical, as it worsens the problem of global warming by wasting electricity.

Take any triple A game, say it could be 20% more optimized with a month in the oven. Say 200,000 people play it for 4+ hours a day, and a patch is made as soon as possible (but the product needed released unoptimized).

We have wasted around 5 million compute-hours, which could be around 400 watts, so ~2 million kwh, or 2 gigawatts of electricity. That amount of electricity equates to about 52,000 gallons of gasoline. Now multiply that by every company that does the same thing, for every release...

(Math: 200,000 people x 4 hours x 20% (.2) = about 5 mill compute hours with rounding for the 4+ hours. 5 mill x 400 watts =~ 2 bill watts, 2 mill kilowatts, 2k megawatts, 2 gigawatt hours. 1 gallon of gasoline is about 33.7 kwh, so about 27,000 gallons for a gigawatt hour, we need two, 52000 gallons.)

Are you implying that that'd somehow be bad? Actually, that metric already exists: installation size!