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Borderlands boss defends game's abysmal performance, kickstarts yet another PR controversy [1]
['Grant St. Clair']
Date: 2025-09-16
Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has done it again. Just as the memory of him saying "real fans" would "find a way" to purchase a potential $80 Borderlands 4 was beginning to fade, he decided to once again insert foot in mouth when the game actually launched. The discussion about Borderlands 4's optimization (or lack thereof) has thus far eclipsed the actual game, so it was only a matter of time before one of the developers weighed in. I think gamers generally hoped it'd be anyone but Randy himself, however.
Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing. — Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) September 15, 2025
The thread is long, but it mostly consists of Randy making excuses for providing misleading recommended specs and encouraging the use of clientside crutches like DLSS frame generation to get around poor performance. Per Twisted Voxel:
Pitchford also defended the studio's decision to target 30 frames per second on minimum hardware specifications and 60 frames per second on recommended specifications, calling this "absolutely reasonable for developers to focus on." He encouraged players seeking higher frame rates to compromise on visual fidelity or resolution and highlighted DLSS as an important tool to smooth the experience. "Use DLSS. It's great. The game was built to take advantage of it," he noted, adding that input lag concerns around the technology are overstated. In a series of follow-up posts, Pitchford shared internal customer service statistics, claiming that valid PC performance complaints account for less than 0.01 percent of players. According to him, most tickets relate instead to SHiFT account issues and console-specific field-of-view controls. "This reality is dramatically different than what you would expect if your only sources of information were, say, certain internet threads," he wrote. Not all players have accepted that explanation. One user responded that submitting a support ticket was unnecessarily complicated, suggesting that many dissatisfied players instead vent through Steam reviews. Another pointed out that the majority of negative reviews cite performance as the central problem.
Nothing like blaming your audience for the problems they're encountering. To be totally honest, I was never going to play Borderlands 4 to begin with, but isn't the whole point of the stylized visuals to reduce performance impact?
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[1] Url:
https://boingboing.net/2025/09/16/borderlands-boss-defends-games-abysmal-performance-kickstarts-yet-another-pr-controversy.html
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