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Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford Tells Borderlands 4 Critics To 'Code Your Own Engine,' Calls It a Game For 'Premium Gamers' (techspot.com) 65

Posted by msmash from the code-it-yourself-then dept.
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has responded to Borderlands 4 performance complaints by calling the game "a premium game made for premium gamers." Pitchford claimed customer service reports for performance issues represent "less than one percent of one percent" of players and told critics to "code your own engine and show us how it's done, please."

The game holds a Mixed rating on Steam despite reaching 300,000 concurrent players Sunday, a franchise record. Gearbox recommends DLSS and frame generation for 60+ fps at 1440p even on powerful hardware. Pitchford compared running the game on older hardware to driving "a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor."
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Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford Tells Borderlands 4 Critics To 'Code Your Own Engine,' Calls It a Game For 'Premium Gamers' More

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford Tells Borderlands 4 Critics To 'Code Your Own Engine,' Calls It a Game For 'Premium Gamers'

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  • Why? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Growlley ( 6732614 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @02:05PM (#65663658)
    he obviously didn't.

    • Indeed (Score:4, Informative)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @02:25PM (#65663714) Homepage Journal

      Indeed, he literally didn't, as Borderlands 4 is a poorly optimized UE5 turd that was squeezed out without sufficient work on performance. This doesn't make UE5 bad, but it does make Randy Pitchford a whiner.

      • I only know BL 2 and that prequel, but noticed so many not-quite-correct things that it feels unfinished and left me with no confidence about sequels.
        Maybe I'll try 3 in five or more years when I (need to) replace my current gaming laptop. And if it runs under Linux/Wine.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by DrXym ( 126579 )
          I've received Borderlands titles in various bundles (2, 3 & pre-sequel), tried them for a bit and honestly don't get what the attraction is meant to be. They are arena style shooters where you beat one area (e.g. a base), a gate or something opens in a cutscene and you move somewhere else where the cycle repeats - rinse & repeat. Oh and collecting too much shit through the loot mechanics so half the game is downtime juggling, selling or repurposing stuff.

          It definitely has a unique and interesting

          • The main thing that kept me playing was the humour in the game. There were plenty of funny moments and I realised there was no plot to take seriously.

            The other reason I played was tinkering with an editor to create legal and illegal extreme weapons.

      • What's the deal with UE5 anyhow? I've played 4 games that use the engine, Robocop (demo), Bellwright, Stalker2 and Oblivion. I've had ridiculous performance and crashing issues with all of those except Bellwright, and it's an early access game. Like fps drops from 60+ to 9, for no reason I can determine. Independent of performance settings or tweaks, it goes from smooth to slideshow. Very annoying.

        Everyone says the same thing you did - "poorly optimized". But for 75% of my sample to have the same pr

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tyr07 ( 8900565 )

          I run UE5 games no problem and they look fantastic. I run a decent system, R7 3800x, 32 GB ram, RTX 3080.

          • Well, I've got a 3070ti and r9 5900x with 32gb ram, and I get inexplicable slideshows. Well, unexplained slideshows. I'm sure there is an explanation, I just don't know it yet.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Tyr07 ( 8900565 )

              It's got to be a bug with drivers or something to do with windows updates. For simple games like league I used to get crashes, or no starts, but, fine now, same hardware, didn't change anything.

              I've seen the same thing with various games. I played Robocop and other UE5 stuff, not a single issue. There is something where all this data collection information would be useful that they do. If they had all the information from systems like mine where it's working, comparing it to similiar systems like yours wher

        • Re:Indeed (Score:4, Insightful)

          by MtHuurne ( 602934 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @03:59PM (#65663944) Homepage

          The UE5 games I've played are Satisfactory, Talos Principle 2 and Ender Magnolia, which all ran fine on my aging mid-range GPU (GeForce 3060 12GB). I haven't played Expedition 33 yet, but that's a UE5 game that reportedly runs smooth as well. So it's certainly possible to release a performing game with UE5.

          One theory I've heard is that early releases of of UE5 performed poorly and later releases improved a lot, but some developers didn't want to risk upgrading the engine after a certain point in development. I lack the knowledge to say how credible that theory is.

          • Well, unfinished Bellwright would certainly count as a later release, but what about Oblivion? That's a pretty recent release, though I wouldn't know how long the development took.

            For all I know, it's my system. Maybe those games hate a bios setting. Maybe I forgot to adjust the rBAR transfer limit (big deal for Control and a couple other games). It's frustrating, especially since Nvidia's tuner app insists I should be playing on max settings. Which works great, for a bit.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by znrt ( 2424692 )

          What's the deal with UE5 anyhow?

          it's complicated. ue5 introduced new tech that replaced many old tricks and greatly simplified development. you just throw stuff in and it works like magic: dynamic lights, shadows and reflections, high quality textures, unlimited polygons, automatic asset streaming ... it's quite impressive. however, all these new tools operate under certain new assumptions that aren't universally understood or known by developers, which can lead to unpredictable results that are very hard to tweak without inside-out knowl

        • The problem with UE5 isnt really UE5 but a problem of workflow. A *lot* of games on UE5 started off as UE4 projects and the teams had moved across without fully appreciating the fundamental differences between the engines. The entire level streaming system is different, to account for the ultra high poly models, the lighting system is completely different, the way the shader system interacts with cards is different. Its just a different engine that just happens to be compatible with the some, but not all, o

          • Oh, I don't expect frame rates like that, but I do expect that a game's autodetect or Nvidia's performance optimizer to give me a decent idea of what settings should work. And when they result in 60-90fps for a little while then drop to 4-9, I get a little annoyed.

            Discussing it here helped though. I have some new ideas about things to check just from talking about it. It may even be something as stupid as my GPU throttling down, or not throttling up. It has, on occasion, done this odd thing where it

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by znrt ( 2424692 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @02:38PM (#65663760)

      well, after saying this he hopefully has a premium ass to shove his premium game in, what a premium idiot even for ceo standards ...

      the moral of the story hasn't changed: never ever buy any aaa game on launch, kids, it will save you a lot of pointless tears.

    • So out of all of the options available to him... he picked the Starfield defence. Interesting choice.

  • If you pay for the bleeding edge hardware you'd like to be able use it.

    For a really long time games targeted kinda of lowest common denominator so they could enjoy the widest possible market. The console/PC parity era of gaming (as in consoles get the same game with the same engine) really kinda made things suck for PC gamers honestly.

    I guess what I am saying is if I shelled out for RTX50[89]0 I'd want to see some really wiz-bang graphics and effects at high frame rates. I don't know if the economics make s

    • Re:If you paid for the bleeding edge (Score:4, Funny)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @02:22PM (#65663702)

      But can it play Crysis?

      • Yes- at 320x240, or 640x480 in DLSS Performance.

      • I can play Crysis on my expensive cryptomining/AI hardware now??? First DOOM on a refrigerator and now this!

        • Still waiting to be able to run DOOM on a shader. I want to run 21760 instances of DOOM on my video card.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by TWX ( 665546 )

          I was rather impressed when someone got DOOM to run on a color printer.

          And of course the frame-rate jokes were pretty damn funny even though it wasn't running by printing a frame at a time on paper, amusing as that would have been.

      • I thought running emacs was the standard.

    • Hear hear. I bought a 4090 to play CP2077 with all the bells and whistles turned on, but I could accept that even that couldn't handle absolutely everything set to the maximum if I played at 4K. So, I turned down the ray-tracing a bit and it was fine from day one (honestly I think a lot of the performance issues came from the consoles trying to do too much with too little, but that's by the by; the only problems I had related to quests not triggering and such.)

      Needing frame generation turned on at 1440p is

    • There's something to this, but not much, because games typically have graphics settings that you can use to get the performance you want at the resolution you want by turning off features. So yes, target the upper end of the hardware, but also make it possible to play on lesser systems.

      • Those with potatos still need to play, but there comes a day the game engines really need to retire compatability with the GTX750 and even the GTX1650.

  • A premium game.... (Score:3)

    by mattfosser ( 6851036 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @02:28PM (#65663728)
    ...........that's cel shaded.......

  • People don't make customer service reports for Unreal crashes because it can submit a log with one click. What does making your own engine have to do with a game using Unreal? Just own the rocky launch, drop some free cosmetics, don't fuck up the DLC again, and your audience will forgive you.

  • I recall the first game. It was fun. It wasn't pretentious. It had a soul. It's funny how these companies rot once they hit it big.

    • The first game ran like trash on the current hardware of the time too, and to this day, after years of patches, it's still the buggiest of the series.

  • Minimum specs on Steam are clear, and pretty low (Score:3)

    by flibbidyfloo ( 451053 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @02:37PM (#65663756)

    I haven't played the game because looter shooters are for children. But a quick look at the minimum specs on Steam indicate that Gearbox must have lied when releasing it if this is an issue.

    MINIMUM:
    i7-9700 (released in 2019)
    RTX 2070 (released in 2018)
    16GB RAM (standard since at least 2018)

    RECOMMENDED:
    i7-12700 (released in 2022)
    RTX 3080 (released in 2020)
    32GB RAM (standard for gaming PCs since like 2022)

    "minimum spec" for a game isn't supposed to mean "technically runs but no one will actually be willing to play it that way".

    • Worse, an RTX 3080 is also.. quite good. It's not fair to say it was released in 2020. After all, the 5050 was released this year, but the 3080 hardware is more powerful. They're essentially asking for your machine to be updated as of last 2 years to play the game correctly.

      • Well that's the problem isn't it? Are they saying that anyone who isn't meeting the recommended specs can't complain about performance? If that's the case then why bother with "minimum specs"? Just say "required specs" and make them as high as you need to have a perfect experience.

        It sounds like Gearbox are being assholes, but I am at arms length in this conversation, so I don't need to get into a protracted discussion about it. I've said my 2c.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Moryath ( 553296 )
        Keep in mind, N-Shitty-A are deliberately restricting DLSS updates to the 40X0 series or later. The 30X0 series are unduly hamstrung by N-Shitty-A not properly updating the drivers, just so N-Shitty-A can try to force people to buy new cards every 3 years.
    • "minimum spec" for a game isn't supposed to mean "technically runs but no one will actually be willing to play it that way".
      i agree.

      but that reminds me back in the day when Doom needed 4mb of RAM to run but 8mb of RAM to make it playable.
      I mean...it would load up on 4mb but it was so slow you could hardly play single player and don't even try over coax network ;)

    • Re:Minimum specs on Steam are clear, and pretty lo (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @05:24PM (#65664130)

      "minimum spec" for a game isn't supposed to mean "technically runs but no one will actually be willing to play it that way"

      Maybe not in your opinion, but it has always meant that, and always will. Marketing departments are a thing.

    • "minimum spec" for a game isn't supposed to mean "technically runs but no one will actually be willing to play it that way".

      The "performance problems" on this game are dramatically overstated.

      My CPU is about halfway between minimum and recommended and I've got an RTX 3080. In High quality preset, I'm getting between 60 and 85 FPS in 4k. That's real-world, my experience, my machine. Now sure... I'm not in Ultra with every possible graphical feature cranked to maximum. But with a CPU and GPU that are five years old why would I expect to?

      I've got a friend playing with a machine more in the 8-year old era running a 1080ti.

    • The "minimum" spec is specified to run the game at 1080p low at 30 fps with upscaling.

      The "recommended" spec is specified to run the game at 1400p medium at 60 fps with upscaling.

      30 FPS isn't playable. It hasn't been for a decade. And at 1080p? What a clusterfuck.

  • Stupid gamers don't know games (Score:3)

    by abulafia ( 7826 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @02:44PM (#65663776)
    I always love it when a game exec tries to gaslight their own customers.

    It is usually execu-newbies who react like this, but this guy looks like he's been in the business for a while, so I'm guessing he's out over his skis on this title.

  • Means graphics from 2012 with a handful of new lighting effects and sub 60 FPS on $4,000 worth of hardware...

    I mean Jesus Randy just use UE 4 and call it a day. We didn't need realistic sunlight in borderlands.

    • It's using UE5, so I'm not sure what you're getting at here? That it didn't need the new engine? That UE 5 is worse somehow?

      Also, they can't drop the cel-shaded look, it's part of the character of the game. I'm not sure what they would transition to--more realism? That would be weird.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Z80a ( 971949 )

        If the game have cel shading visuals, you don't need to do things that trounce a 5080, or make the consoles go to single digit frame rates or even less, as it's being reported to happen on the Xbox series.

        • Yeah this. Jet Set/Grind Radio looked amazing on the Dreamcast because it didn't render stuff it didn't have to when creating the cel shaded look. Therefore you could have big complex scenes that performed fluidly at all times. I thought that was the point of this game which I haven't played, get off my lawn etc etc.

          There's several OSS FPSes built around this concept, but all of them that I've seen have been pretty lo-fi so it would make sense to me that it would take a commercial title to sell it. Finding

          • The Dreamcast/PowerVR architecture was pretty awesome. But if there's one thing computing keeps teaching us, it's that in the end, brute force beats specalization. That said, we're about at the point for somebody to wire up eight SATA lanes in parallel, and make Super Parallel ATA or something. Then, in another twenty years, move back to serial when they realize that it's faster to blast eight bits down whatever new system there is, than to synchronize eight lanes. And so on.

        • Well, no. You can see the difference between BL2 and BL3 despite them both being cel shaded games. You want fancy visual effects and the lighting still matters.

          Also, we should be clear that Unreal isn't just a graphics engine, it's a whole game engine, and I don't think that we should be surprised that UE5 is a bit heavier and is doing more things. BL4 is a more open world game; I'm sure that's doing something.

          Anyway, I haven't played it yet, and launches these days all seem to be a bit difficult for compan

  • .. the "Pitchfork"-Effekt.

    (s/k/d -- was intended)

  • I have a better idea. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @03:55PM (#65663934) Journal

    I'll just ignore your non-performant software until it's either fixed, or hardware advances sufficiently to make it work as expected.

    In the meantime, he won't see a cent of my money, and by the time either of those two conditions are met, it will be at a discount anyway because it will be months / years old.

    Fuck that guy. Instead of calling your customers names and bitching about their totally legitimate performance complaints, try making software that meets customer expectations. It's like these people learned nothing from the Cyberpunk fiasco.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dmbrun ( 907271 )
      ... and it's on GOG.

    • In the meantime, he won't see a cent of my money, and by the time either of those two conditions are met, it will be at a discount anyway because it will be months / years old.

      By that point, they'll be giving out free licenses on Epic, right before Tiny Tina's Telltale Pre-Sequel Bonerfarts 3 comes out.

  • The problem is a combination of resource-hogging DRM being forced on these games by publishers and developers not being given the time needed to actually optimize their games for performance (although as someone who has been involved with performance optimizations in a game engine, I can feel for those who have to do it, its not always easy)

  • Teetering on the edge of relevance anyway (Score:3, Interesting)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Tuesday September 16, 2025 @05:01PM (#65664094) Journal

    BL was groundbreaking as a looter-shooter.
    BL2 was probably the pinnacle of the franchise. Great writing, great characters, good story. Child Schmafficking.
    Tales was probably the peak writing/narrative delivery.
    PreSequel was...we don't talk about the pre-sequel.
    BL3 was completely disappointing.
    BL4 The fact that Gearbox was militantly woke by this time is basically irrelevant (wrap your trannie franken-unit in the pride flag, I don't care I just want a good game) but their writing has been utter shit since TT. That a $3k PC chugs to run it - is asinine.

  • What's wrong with "Yeah, there are some kinks that we overlooked. It's because the studio had to get the release out before bladiblah. We're working on a patch that addresses the issue. Anyone who bought the game until yesterday will get skin/pet/neat-fun-little-soapbubblegun as a bonus DLC for the inconvenience."

    It costs like nothing to do this and you'll be portrayed the cool gaming company dude.

    Borderlands is a beloved franchise, it's not that the fans will get all worked up about this. Why insult your c

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