Borderlands 4 boss tells players "please get a refund from Steam if you aren't happy" as Randy Pitchford continues his very public crashout over the FPS's performance woes

Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid? Never heard of the guy before, but he seems to behave like a petty little child throwing a tantrum for something that is obviously his or some of his near colleagues fault. Comparable level of stupidity to "Do you guys not have phones?" lol.

I think they would be better of by just ignoring or at least appeasing the crowd with something.

Edit: I read into some of his key moments as a person and comments he made on the topic. Yikes. Maybe he is trying to appeal to edgy kids so they nag their parents to buy better hardware. Maybe his brain got quadruple-A-fried over the years. But then again, maybe he is just another CEO asshole and has always been lol. It's a shame, Borderlands 1 and 2 were great games back then. Just let a good game rest in peace, there is no need and no sense in milking every last drop out of every successful series. /rant

Never heard of the guy before
Lucky you. Randy has a long history of being an insufferable asshole
- Pretty much. Can't remember what he did that ticked me off like 8 years ago.
  I stopped buying and surprise surprise, got everything after Borderland 2 for literally free or like $2-3 at some point.
Present times have shown us that a lot of CEOs are incompetent idiots with mental disorders
Musk/Trump type wannabe.
Yeah, I'm a longtime Borderlands fan who follows what's going on with the franchise, and Randy just acts like a child who inherited a video game company. He usually says this dumb shit with a smile on his face, so I think he's intending it to be in good fun, but it just does not come across that way.
- right?
  Randy Pitchford has been this way for years.
  I guess its news to some people Randy shooting off his mouth.
- Could as well be the case. Would fit to the general theme of the series lol.
No, in fact at this point, I struggle to imagine what value he could possibly provide his employer that could match or exceed the damage he's doing. Certainly, everywhere I've worked in the games industry he'd have been out on his ass... some time ago. I clearly must be missing something. Who knows?
I mean, he's the CEO, but there must be a board and a group of investors he's answering to.
I think they would be better of by just ignoring
I mean the best thing they could do is to acknowledge that the game could use some optimization and promise to continue working on it. Even if they have no intention of doing so. But that might get them in trouble with Nvidia since they slapped an "Nvidia optimized" badge on it.
The worst thing they could do is say "buy a better PC".
- Exactly, like what CDPR did with Cyberpunk - own up to the fact that it was shit on release, then take the time to fix it and update it. People flipped nearly overnight from having a negative opinion of the game to a positive one when they released the working version of the game (plus a really solid DLC, which probably helped too).
- I think that sticker just means you sent Nvidia a pre-release build so they had time to add game-specific hacks to their drivers before your launch.
Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid?
It’s not. It works because he’s always operated like this and keeps getting away with it. People keep sucking up his garbage games so why should he change?
I hadent heard of him until BL4 was released, but man does he seem like a real big piece of work lol
I’ve seen a few people speculate that it’s some 3D chess marketing move.
I think it’s just immaturity and an inability to take criticism. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, as they say.

I literally thought an in game boss was telling you to get a refund

That would be comical. Breaking the 4th wall, boss talking shit. Get a refund punk you suck at this, while you're at it throw your PC in a lake, fish play better.
- Dude that’s some serious Sans stuff
- To make it perfect, the boss should appear right after the two hour mark is met, so you actually can't. The boss should also use that material. Modern day metal gear solid is they also manage to pull user owned games and game data from steam API or something.

He's right. Refund it and don't bother supporting him again. Simple!

I disagree. Don't buy it to begin with lol
Exactly. I don't get why people even cares about what this dude is saying. Dont like the game? Refund it ffs.
- They care because people that haven’t bought it should know that these issues don’t seem to be getting better. They should know that their money would be going to that asshole’s pockets. This shit matters and you wanting to plug your ears to discomfort doesn’t change that.

This guy is why PR consultants and Social Media teams exist. Some people just should not have contact with the public. However good he might or might not be in his work on the project itself, someone should have told him to sit down and shut up and let someone who knows how not to damage the entire game with a single statement handle the communication.

I generally have nothing but a deep sense of loathing for marketing, but I genuinely feel bad for the people who have to try smearing lipstick on this pig.
- Is it really that bad?
  I'm not much of a fan of the series, but the complaints I'm seeing are in the "I only get 30fps instead of 60fps on ultra!" kinds of things that make me roll my eyes super hard
Problem is, there's no such thing as bad press. Here we are talking about it.
- Yep, talking about how I will never buy a gearbox game.
- "There's no such thing as bad press" is such a dogshit saying that is demonstrably untrue. There is absolutely bad press, just because we're talking about it doesn't mean it's good for the product. For every one schmuck who thinks they'll buy Borderlands 4 just to prove how good their computer is, there's a hundred people who have decided never to buy it at all and half if them have written off gearbox entirely.

Dude is a never ending source of stupidity.

So it's been reported that the PS 5 suffers from performance issues, especially during long play periods due to being perfectly optimized and this is his latest response:

“Known issue of perf dropping on PS5 pro after several hours of continuous play,” he said. “Workaround until we patch: Quit game and restart. Sorry for the friction!”

I mean, he's an airheaded out-of-touch fellow-kids piece of shit, but he's not entirely wrong about restarting a game if it starts getting fucky after several hours of continuous play.
Also, I'd suggest to just about anyone that they should probably at least get up and walk around, maybe get some fresh air, if you're gonna be gaming all day. Your devices need breaks too.
- Devices don't "need breaks". This problem is indicative of a memory leak, which means they coded something shitty.
  Sure, playing for 7 hours straight is excessive, but this shouldn't happen.
- He's not wrong, but a game you have to do that to isn't made very well.
- Lol @ devices need breaks too. What an absolute nonsense.
- Honestly for a new game three or for hours sessions on a game like this is pretty normal and people are saying that it's a constant drop in performance after just an hour or two and continues to get worse until your running like your in a 1070.
  And no these consoles and computers are not expected to need a break after just a two hours of running, that's not how good applications work.

Man I don't know how the board of directors is going to feel about the CEO telling people to refund their game. That seems like it would be on the list of things you don't want your CEO telling people.

it got the community manager for helldivers 2 fired, so... 🍿

Randy has inspired me to purchase the game and immediately refund it. Thanks Randy!

I guess the most hated man on the internet had a point when he called Randy out for having shitty takes

Who is the most hated man on the internet? I thought that was me.

I don't get it. Borderlands 1 ran at like 720p (less?) on native hardware (Xbox 360) and it looked great, mostly because of the cel-shaded graphics. Cel-shaded was code (maybe still is) for low-res and it covers it up well. So I feel like anyone trying to push 4K Borderlands (Gearbox, or players) is in the wrong here and that may be part of the problem. Now if Borderlands 4 can't run at 1080p or 1440p on good hardware... that's Gearbox's problem to fix. Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as Animal Crossing at 8K — apparently that has been accomplished with a very powerful computer and an emulator. (AC for Switch is not performance locked to hardware, it'll scale up to whatever you can run it on.) But it just begs the question "fucking WHY?".

I feel like the discourse around Borderlands 4 should be "is it fun" followed at a great distance by "is the story compelling enough to draw me in?" I did not have plot expectations for the first one, and it exceeded them.

Disclaimer: played and beat BL1 and all its DLC. Dabbled in 2 and 3. Have not played BL4 yet. Looking forward to a Siren play on my Series X at some point, but not now.

Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as...
On the contrary, it should be perfectly runnable at 4K because its a 2025 FPS game and the cel-shaded graphics should be easy to render.
'Unreal Engine' is no excuse either. Try something like Satisfactory rendering literally thousands of dynamic machines on a shoestring budget with Lumen, like butter, on 2020 GPUs, and tell me that's a sluggish engine.
This is on Gearbox, who've developed on Unreal for 2 decades. And 'sorry, we'll work on it' would have been a fine response...
- My understanding is that Unreal is a garbage engine for optimization at face value, it has a lot of useful tools and a lot of incorrect/dated documentation for those tools some of which are also just kind of configured wrong as their default settings. If effort is put into optimization to configure things correctly and only use the various tools like nanite or lumen in their actual use cases (rather than just throwing them on everything) you can get some pretty fantastic optimization.
  TLDR: Good but complex tools marketed as low effort with bad defaults and exagerated marketing.
- Right because Cyberpunk looks amazing in 2025 and it ran like shit five years ago at launch.
  But 4K gaming is more demanding than people realise and gaming companies shouldn't be getting so much flak for it.

Overrated franchise has dogshit legacy sequel. More news at 11.

Seems like the kind of guy I'd want in charge of my company. "Don't buy my stuff" is some next level 4D marketing.

He probally knows only a certain percentage of his audience will ever hear about this.

Damn, that all is Comedy and insanely ridiculous.

People wanted this Game so Bad. They fucked up a bit .. and the CEO goes banana. What a sad ending to this

CRASH! SLAMMED! POPPED!

Hey board of directors! Make me your new CEO and I will fix this problem!

[Gabe Dislike That]

Gabe not even noticing from 1 of his 6 superyachts

Borderlands really didnt deserve another chance after the shit games theyve released but it seems people fell for.the marketing and gave it one anyway. Now the same thing is happening the game is shit and was sold at a ridiculous price and while you're sitting there trying to scrap together some enjoyment youve got this asshole Randy hitting headlines daily.