Randy Pitchford Can’t Keep His Mouth Shut: “Borderlands 4 is a Premium Game For Premium Gamers.”
- Randy Pitchford defends Borderlands 4 as a “premium game,” dismissing PC performance complaints.
- Players push back, saying it runs poorly on modern hardware and accusing him of being out of touch.
- Reviews are Mixed, with bugs and optimization issues leading many to recommend waiting for patches or a sale.
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CEO Defense
Borderlands 4 released on Friday Sept. 12, and the weekend has seen Randy Pitchford, Gearbox CEO, bombarding social media with wild claims and boasts about how well the game runs, despite many players fiercely denying this.
Player reviews have already called out the game for multiple issues, from stuttering graphics to memory leaks. Pitchford has thrown his hat in the ring several times since Friday to hammer home the point that Borderlands 4 is a high-end game with respective specs.
“This is not a game made to run on 10 year old PCs – this game uses the full capabilities of modern bus, CPU, and GPU. If you’re trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower’s motor, you’re going to be disappointed,” he posted on X. “If you discover your system can’t run the game well by accident or wishful thinking and/or don’t want to try to mess with settings to make things good enough for you, please use the refund feature on Steam rather than have a subpar experience.”
Dazzle ‘em With Stats
Users on X have responded to Pitchford’s comments, saying he’s deflecting attention from the technical issues instead of actually solving them, as well as being out-of-touch with the player base.
“Randy, the Playstation 5 came out 5 years ago,” said xfreshcutflower. “People using mid- to high tier PC components released 2021 and onward should be able to enjoy a stable 1080p 60fps experience without hitches. You are just showing how much of a disconnected, greasy corpo shitlord you really are.”
Fallen1254 chimed in with “Nobody is asking BL4 to run perfectly on a 10 year old PC. We are talking about mainstream GPUs like the RTX 3060 and 4060, the most common cards in the market RIGHT NOW. They can obliterate visually richer titles from years ago, yet BL4 struggles at 1080p because UE5’s pipeline is bloated and inefficient.”
“Telling players to ‘use the refund feature’ if they don’t like it, is an admission that the product is DEFECTIVE.”
Pitchford didn’t stop there, though. He made sure to inform people that he has personally handled some customer service reports, and that the overall amount of reports is extremely low.
“Fun facts: Customer Service reports for Borderlands 4 at roughly 1% or so of installs. More than half of the tickets (~0.55% of customers) are users reporting difficulty with their SHiFT accounts (lost e-mails/access, etc). The next highest ticket is about FoV controls on console (working on it).”
“Next, 0.055% of customers are reporting issues with Twitch drops. And, 0.04% of customers are PC performance related, with CS flagging 0.009% as ‘valid’. 0.037% have experienced success with education (settings coaching).”
“That is less than one percent of one percent (0.01%) of customers using CS tickets for valid performance issues, which is less than 1/5 of the users using CS to get help with Twitch drops. This reality is dramatically different than what you would expect if your only sources of information were, say, certain internet threads.”
You Can’t Break Something That’s Already Broken
A lot of gamers have noted that they just get refunds if a new game they buy runs like an epileptic grandmother, rather than potentially wait ages for tech support to tell them something they already know. In this case, that Borderlands 4 really struggles on even modern PCs.
Even so, Pitchford used this past weekend to try and get ahead of the technical issues by inviting players to “stress test” the game. SHiFT codes with exclusive content were handed out as incentives, as the CEO urged gamers to try and break the “on-line infrastructure.”
“Listen – I’m telling you that it’s going to be VERY unlikely you guys can be enough people to break the backend and take our game down. I know there have been some high profile backend on-line systems failing around big AAA game launches, but not this one.”
“So here it is…I’m throwing down the gauntlet: you cannot break our on-line infrastructure through too many players. You can’t. Hacking doesn’t count, btw. Just concurrent players in the game is what we’re looking for. Play cooperatively; jump into random people’s games; log in and out a bunch of times at peak hours… Whatever you can fairly and reasonably do within the game to add pressure to the system, do it!”
Player numbers are still being calculated by Steam, but at the moment the platform shows a steady increase, with 304,398 as the all-time peak on Sept. 14. Players have reported some issues from the weekend, such as being stuck in a respawn loop and failing to connect to online games, but there hasn’t been any word from Pitchford as to whether he counts these as issues worth paying attention to.
A Passionate Bunch
Player reviews for Borderlands 4 currently sit at Mixed, with gamers having called it everything from “a bug-riddled mess” to “pretty good,” but even a lot of the positive reviews warn other players to hold off until the game is cheaper.
“Love how modern day games can’t be bothered to be optimized anymore, and they still want $70,” reads one negative review, while a recent positive review says “Pretty fun gameplay, a lot to do but wouldn’t recommend paying full price for this game until it goes on sale.”
Gearbox rolled out a game update on Sept. 13 to try and improve PC stability, although the company also suggested players check out its NVIDIA optimization guide, or an AMD one.
Most recently, Pitchford posted on X to remind people that Borderlands 4 is completely awesome and if you’re still having issues with it, then it’s probably your fault somehow.
“It is a mistake to believe or expect that PCs between minimum specification and recommended specification can achieve all of extremely high frame rate, maximum/ultra features, and extremely high resolution,” he said, helpfully pointing out the obvious.
“If that last post makes you have a negative reaction, I bet you have emotions and expectations that you feel aren’t sufficiently attended to. I’m sorry.”
Other than the expected “please fix the game” replies he received from this latest barrage of tweets, one user summed up the general consensus: “I am begging you to stop tweeting.”
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