Worried the impending arrival of $80 games might price you out of your favourite hobby? Well if Borderlands 4 follows suit, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has suggested the community should just suck it up and deal with it. “If you’re a real fan,” he recently told a potential purchaser, “you’ll find a way to make it happen.”
Pitchford made the proclamation on social media after a Borderlands fan opined, “Randy, [Borderlands 4] better not be $80. Don’t take that risk, a lot of gamers aren’t gonna pay $80 and feed this notion of constant increase of the price tag. You are the CEO, you have some say with the price when it comes to your publisher.”
But Pitchford begged to differ. “Not my call,” he insisted, before dismissing pricing concerns. “If you’re a real fan, you’ll find a way to make it happen. My local game store had Starflight for Sega Genesis for $80 in 1991 when I was just out of high school working minimum wage at an ice cream parlour in Pismo Beach and I found a way to make it happen.”
The response from Borderlands fans on social media was, unsurprisingly, swift, strong, and overwhelmingly negative. “Thanks, now I won’t buy the Game even if it costs $70”, one person wrote, while another added, “That has to be one of the worst CEO replies from recent memory.” Another called Pitchford’s comment “elitist [and] out of touch”; “Rich person says just find the money,” another wrote, with plenty more using considerably stronger language.