Performance testing is part of the testing that should usually be done before application goes live, and, originally, the test server was provided for that exact purpose. So you're wrong on 2 levels
1) test server should naturally have higher capacity than live servers to verify what is the amount of resources needed for live servers to work properly before they have any chance to fail
2) it also shows they fail at executing usual testing strategy, if they cant even provide enough resources for players to do functional testing, let alone load testing.
It says ALOT about the issues that can be there few months from now.