Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford tells Borderlands 4 critics to "code your own engine," calls it a game for "premium gamers"

[midian182]

A hot potato: Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford is not known for his tactful, well-thought-out responses to controversial topics. The latest PR disaster he's waded into is the Borderlands 4 performance nightmare. He's claimed that it's "a premium game made for premium gamers," suggesting the fault lies with those lacking high-end hardware. The exec also said "less than one percent of one percent" of players are filing customer service tickets about performance issues, and asked people to "code your own engine and show us how it's done, please."

While Borderlands 4 has received mostly positive reviews from critics, players have slammed the awful performance and bugs, leaving it with a Mixed rating on Steam. Gearbox recommends that even powerful graphics cards/CPU combinations require DLSS and frame generation to play at 60+ fps in 1440p or higher – check out our 40 GPU benchmark feature to learn more.

Pitchford has been facing plenty of angry comments on X since Borderlands 4's launch, and he's been responding in his usual diplomatic way. On Saturday, he called it a "premium game made for premium gamers," he explained.

"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 try to play it. So some try and get mad."

Pitchford then doubled down with, "if you're trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower's motor, you're going to be disappointed."

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…

– Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) September 13, 2025

There are, of course, plenty of responses from people noting that even with an RTX 4090 and Ryzen 9 7950X combination, they are getting 40 – 60 fps when playing without upscaling/frame generation.

Not one to back down from a fight with the entire internet, Pitchford then slammed those complaining about having to use upscaling.

"If you are so attached to the idea that DLSS is bad for your game experience because of something you saw or read on the internet, I am sorry," he wrote. The CEO also said he believed humans cannot detect any input lag in a blind test, though he seems to be talking about DLSS rather than frame generation.

Another piece of information that Pitchford revealed in the mistaken belief it would placate players is that only around 1% of installs for Borderlands 4 have resulted in customer service reports, and less than 1% of those are for performance issues. But then it's not like many people even send support tickets for poor performance; most just request a refund from the digital store.

Fun facts: Customer Service reports for Borderlands 4 at roughly 1% or so of installs.

Using that simple, rounded ratio…

More than half of the tickets (~0.55% of customers) are users reporting difficulty with their SHiFT accounts (lost e-mails/access, etc).

The next highest…

– Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) September 14, 2025

Having seemingly lost patience with ungrateful Borderlands 4 buyers who don't even have the decency to spend over $1,500 on hardware to play the game (with DLSS and frame gen enabled, naturally), Pitchford snapped, "Code your own engine and show us how it's done, please. We will be your customer when you pull it off."

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…

– Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) September 13, 2025

"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"

Despite all the issues, Borderlands still managed to reach 300,000 concurrent players on Steam on Sunday, a record for the franchise. It's currently the second top seller on Valve's platform and number six when it comes to daily active users.

This isn't Pitchford's first online tirade this year. He got into trouble by claiming "real fans" would pay $80 for Borderlands 4 if it launched with that price tag. Thankfully for everyone, it didn't.

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Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford tells Borderlands 4 critics to "code your own engine," calls it a game for "premium gamers"

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Perhaps Randy should try to code some new buyers for his garbage software?

Seriously, can someone shut him up? He does more damage to Borderlands then the writers, and that is a tall ask! 2K needs to realize it is in their best interest to muzzle him before he alienates more of the fanbase, in todays world those fanbases dont come back. He clearly cannot handle having open social media accounts.

 

[noel24]

This guy doesn't know when to shut up for His own good.
How many gamers in the world owns RTX4090-5090? 1 million? 2 millions?
He gonna be selling It to Epic for peanuts soon.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

This guy doesn't know when to shut up for His own good.
How many gamers in the world owns RTX4090-5090? 1 million? 2 millions?
He gonna be selling It to Epic for peanuts soon.

It doesnt even look good. With all the eye candy turned on....it looks just like borderlands 3, which was just a higher def borderlands 2. It's cel shading, its not known for fine detail! If you hav eto used balanced upscaling, well, it looks worse then any previous borderlands. TAA blur-o-vision ahoy!

So why does it run so badly? How did they spend $300 MILLION making this scrap heap?

 

[godrilla]

So he just admitted he will not spend significant resources to improve the performance or optimize it via updates. A beta test to nowhere. What a clown!

 

[KedsDead]

Is this hype train dead yet?

Another poor performing UE5 game. ( let me get my shocked face out of the closet )

Game Engine developers blames game developers. Article over.

Game Developer "Sucks to be Poor"

Back to Hell Divers 2, back to having some fun.

 

[godrilla]

This guy doesn't know when to shut up for His own good.
How many gamers in the world owns RTX4090-5090? 1 million? 2 millions?
He gonna be selling It to Epic for peanuts soon.

Daniel Owen has a video showing that the recommend optimized settings specifically the upscaling lol shows ghosting. Even the upscaling is not optimized.

 

[PXAbstraction]

Does Take-Two not have an Social Media Policy for employees or something? I've worked at tiny companies that literally require in their contracts that you either don't talk about corporate topics or at least, do so professionally. And Gearbox is wholly owned by Take-Two, Greasy Randy works for them now. Surely they're able to tell him to STFU?

 

[Dreadcthulhu]

So why does it run so badly? How did they spend $300 MILLION making this scrap heap?

Various flavors of embezzlement seems reasonably plausible at this point.

 

[KedsDead]

Randi spent 30 seconds picking a color for a piece of equipment and wrote himself a check for this golden parachute.

 

[RudyBob]

I like the cut of his jib. Tell the crybabies they are crybabies.

 

[m4a4]

Lol, he's taking customer service reports for performance issues at face value? Not many gamers are going to jump through hoops to send a ticket saying performance is bad or it's crashing a lot. They're going to do the much easier thing and stop playing (finding a better game to play), and/or (if bought on Steam) write an easy and convenient negative review.
Mixed (66%) as of right now, but even some of the positive reviews I skimmed over are saying the optimization is bad. That certainly doesn't sound like less than a 1% issue if you take Steam a little seriously...

 

[brucek]

I've played a bit now on two systems, one a 3080 and the other a 5070ti, using the recommended graphics settings other than I prefer not to use frame gen. The game looks and plays fine to me on my 1440p monitors but then again my personal utility curve for higher frame rates drops off sharply after 90fps or so. For users with similar and better gear who are making a fuss, I do wonder how much is from what they can actually see and feel on the screen, vs. how much is academic based on distaste for DLSS or other non-end-result judgments. But I know players can be very different that way.

For players with older / less capable gear, I do see the point. The game places a lot more demands on hardware resources than Borderlands 3 without delivering a lot of obvious gameplay benefit for having done so. If my system couldn't run the game adequately I'd wonder why these tradeoffs were made too.

 

[BogdanR]

A fine example of the “let them eat cake” customer care philosophy evolving into “bake yer own, you d@mn pesky peasants!”.

 

[Skjorn]

Large devs and their publishers that switch to UE from their own in-house engine should only get to charge $30 if they're going to be doing much less work and firing engine teams. If they want to spend less money on it then so will I.

It's just something gamers should agree upon if they're going to keep getting poor performing games.

 

[gamerk2]

So why does it run so badly? How did they spend $300 MILLION making this scrap heap?

Managers, and managers to oversee the managers. Plus spending half their development time with developers stuck in AGILE meetings to spend 5 minutes stating "the feature isn't complete yet" while upper management spends HOURS talking in circles.

Management is the problem. All it exists for is to create more and more layers of management in order to oversee the different layers of management.

 

[GeoffreyA]

This chap showed how obtuse he is, blowing his top off like that. Gamers won't mind if a company took accountability and fixed the problem (there's probably a lot of performance in the tank), but derogatory responses to your customers will only make them non-customers and not want to touch your game.

 

[Billybobjoey]

It doesnt even look good. With all the eye candy turned on....it looks just like borderlands 3, which was just a higher def borderlands 2. It's cel shading, its not known for fine detail! If you hav eto used balanced upscaling, well, it looks worse then any previous borderlands. TAA blur-o-vision ahoy!

So why does it run so badly? How did they spend $300 MILLION making this scrap heap?

Borderlands 3 even ran pretty good on my 2070 at the time at 1440p, now a couple of years later the absolute flagship monster that is the 5090 can't even hit 60fps at 4k native with decent settings? Absolutely ridiculous. Definitely a skip until it's fixed and under $30.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Managers, and managers to oversee the managers. Plus spending half their development time with developers stuck in AGILE meetings to spend 5 minutes stating "the feature isn't complete yet" while upper management spends HOURS talking in circles.

Management is the problem. All it exists for is to create more and more layers of management in order to oversee the different layers of management.

The you have management forming a committee to discuss meeting times to schedule a conference to discuss the next meeting where a decision will be made on the next meeting to discuss the decision and if it should be made.

The Corporate Circus!

 

[3volv3d]

Borderlands 2 should have been where this stopped.
The game was ok. Not great.
The gazillion guns is just ****. There's no real customisation you just get loot drops with random stats.
Graphically meh.
Prequel was just ugly.
And BL3 big but nothing to draw you in. It's just the same as the others.
Dull fast.
Can safely say BL4 needs too be on sale for 95% at least and I need to be off my tits, before I accidentally purchase this failure.

 

[James321]

If it was only 1% of 1% complaining then we would not have had a response from this clown.

Well most people just ask for refund, which is good why throw money at bad games.

 

[gamerk2]

The you have management forming a committee to discuss meeting times to schedule a conference to discuss the next meeting where a decision will be made on the next meeting to discuss the decision and if it should be made.

The Corporate Circus!

My father was an Engineering lead/manager at a multi-Billion multinational for over 30 years.

When he first got his position in the late 80s, he was responsible for managing over 100 individuals across multiple engineering disciplines, split across facilities on both coasts, running 24/7 manning. And he had personal purchasing authority up to $100k.

When he left right after the pandemic, he had 12 direct people under him, and management wanted to break up his department because "no one should be responsible for managing more then 10 people", and "its impossible to manage personnel who are off-site". And he had zero purchasing authority without corporate VP level approval.

So point being, the way things are managed now you have literally 10x the management personnel to manage the same number of people, and that's disregarding the fact you need managers to manage management due to the "can't manage more then 10 people" rule.

 

[hahahanoobs]

It goes both ways.
Gamers bought the game.

 

[DukeJukem]

"code your own engine."

how bout u stop "fixing" what isn't broken lol. there's no requirement to upgrade your engine with your cell shaded anime comic level graphics my guy.

 

[KedsDead]

I watched a video from Owen.. Even on low the lighting looked good. I wonder if they just have all the bells and whistles turned on for Lumen lighting.. ( ray tracing ) and just dont have a way to lower it.. or forgot to setup a way to lower it..