Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford Insults Players Over ‘Borderlands 4’ Launch Issues: “Code Your Own Engine”
Another day, another instance of Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford showing what NOT to do as a public-facing business leader, this time offering his demonstration by way of meeting the understandable disappointment many fans felt over Borderlands 4‘s rough launch state with frantic, insulting condescension.
Hitting the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows platforms on September 12th (with a Nintendo Switch 2 version coming on October 3rd), the latest entry in the definitionally ‘Reddit‘ series debuted to a less-than-warm reception among “players.
But rather than taking issue with the series’ signature writing – which, let’s be honest, who could blame them if they did – the public was instead frustrated with just how terribly unoptimized Borderlands 4 actually was, with PC-based Vault Hunters reporting that no matter how powerful their own hardware, they were still encountering frame rate stutters and regular game crashes (even they could even get the game to run at all).
For a deeper dive, noted computer technology and video game-centric news outlet Digital Foundry opened their most recent Digital Foundry Direct Weekly with a comparative breakdown of Borderlands 4‘s performance issues:
As negative sentiment against his brand-new game began to build, the aforementioned Pitchford took to his personal Twitter account to offer players not a fix to his studio’s sloppy craftsmanship, but instead a number of tips on how to properly optimize one’s own system:
“If you’re playing Borderlands 4 on PC and want to boost your performance, @MoxsyOG shared this settings tip where he was able to jump from 90fps to 160fps! I hear he’ll be posting the full video soon and you can watch him play on Twitch at https://twitch.tv/moxsy“
“Quickie for my console friends: Motion Blur – Not us. We aren’t down with motion blur and do not support it. If you’re seeing what seems to be motion blur, maybe check your television settings for whatever automatic BS it might be doing to your image? It’s not us.”
Pitchford even attempted to write-off the inability for players on more recent PC hardware to play the game at max settings by dismissing their inability to play the game according to their preferred settings as a ‘fair trade’ for their ability to play the game.
“We had some [Customer Service] work prove that through settings tweaks only being able to climb up to 120fps + on PC in BL4 with three and four year old hardware. Your mileage may vary, but please consider using the tools available to you to tune your own balance between FPS, resolution and graphics features.
“There are as many PC hardware component and graphics settings combinations as there are guns in BL4 (billions) and with the right settings you can turn a grey drop into green, blue, or even purple gear. We’re doing a lot of work on our end to help to automate those settings better as we parse the huge amount of telemetry coming in. But you don’t have to wait for a patch to get nice frame rate with BL4. We’ll do more to share tips and guidance also.”
“I know a lot of you are dead set on playing at 4k with ultra max settings and using two or three year old hardware. You do you, but BL4 and UE5 [Unreal Engine 5] are doing a lot and for me that trade off for frames isn’t worth it.
“I play at 1440P with settings super high and am super happy with that trade off – the game looks amazing at 1440P. If you’re not 4K stubborn and just want to have a great, fun time with higher perf, please consider running at 1440P resolution. If you’ve got a beast of a video card, you’re probably fine at 4K. But if you’re in the middle or close to min spec, I would definitely recommend making that trade.”
In turn hit with both a question as to the specs of the supposed PC he had used to perform this test and a frustrated jab regarding the fact that while “It’s great you’re offering help, [it] woulda been better to build it for the most common hardware in the first place”, Pitchford would launch into a strangely defensive tirade that included boasts about Borderlands 4‘s quality, the goalposts regarding hardware being moved from ‘It’s not meant for less-than-new PCs’ to ‘It’s not meant for PCs that are a decade old’, and a doubling-down on his insistence that, in the words of The Simpsons‘ Principal Seymour Skinner, ‘It’s the children who are wrong‘:
“The minimum and recommended specs are published. The most common hardware is a four year old cell phone. Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers. Just as Borderlands 4 cannot run on a PlayStation 4, it cannot be expected to run on too-old PC hardware.
“Unlike on PlayStation and Xbox, we cannot prevent a PC player with sub-optimal hardware for the game from trying to play it. So some try and get mad. And some have actual issues we need to fix. And some need to learn how their PC’s work at the high end for this specific game in 2025 and use the tools available to them to find the right balance between frame rate, resolution, and graphics features.
“This is not a game made to run on 10 year old PC’s – this game uses the full capabilities of modern bus [in layman’s terms, a data communication system], CPU, and GPU. If you’re trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower’s motor, you’re going to be disappointed. 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.”
Pitchford was then met by another Twitter user who bluntly critiqued, “Or just an idea here make your game look good without relying on AI upscale,” to which he condescendingly them, essentially, ‘Why don’t you do it, smartypants?’:
“Code your own engine and show us how it’s done, please. We will be your customer when you pull it off.
“The people doing it now are clearly dumb and don’t know what they’re doing and all the support and recommendations and code and architecture from the world’s greatest hardware companies and tech companies working with the world’s greatest real time graphics engine coders don’t know what you seem to know. /sarcasm”
From there, Pitchford would attempt to defend Borderlands 4‘s launch state as pointing to the fact that per their Customer Service team, only a small, small, small percentage of players were unable to solve their issues with simple settings tweaks:
“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 [separately] using Customer Serivce 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.”
As of this article’s publication, Gearbox has not yet announced any official fixes for Borderlands 4‘s performance issues.
And to make matters worse, rather than just getting off of social media and working on a fix, Pitchford has instead chosen the classic move of ‘Posting through it’, his most recent, multi-tweet defense even starting with the audacious declaration that, “Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing.”
NEXT: ‘Borderlands’ Review – A Soulless Studio Film That Deserves Its Failure
