Gearbox's Randy Pitchford Responds To ‘Borderlands 4' Price Debacle
Gearbox
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford went extremely viral yesterday after a week-old tweet was passed around responding to a fan comment about a potential $80 price for Borderlands 4:
'A) Not my call. B) 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 parlor in Pismo Beach and I found a way to make it happen.'
The tweet inspired hundreds if not thousands of takes about its tone-deafness, plus gaming outlet coverage far and wide. It comes at a time when consumer spending power is dropping and prices are going up, and telling people if they're a 'real fan' they can make an $80 price work did not go over well, to say the least. Many fans said the tweet had derailed promotion for the game out in four months, others said they wouldn't play at all now. I find this at least…somewhat dramatic, and I have my doubts a tweet is going to significantly affect Bordlerands 4 sales this fall. But that price might.
Today, Pitchford addressed the tweet by posting an older clip where he was asked about a potential price.
It's a much more nuanced take on the issue, though it certainly seems to indicate that $80 is in the cards. Though this time, he says things like how he wants to create a value that fans will be happy with at any price, and addresses the plain fact that the production cost of Borderlands 4 is double that of Borderlands 3.
I am no stranger to off-putting tweets from Pitchford as I've had some dust-ups myself. But a poorly-put tweet does in fact represent a larger reality (as explained in this video) about ballooning video game costs, which is true. I remember when it was revealed that Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 had triple the budget of the first game despite using a barely larger version of the same city and a second hero that had already been created for a spin-off.
This is certainly not to say that $80 is the right call. Consumer only just got used to the $70 increase from $60 a few years ago, and now this leap to $80, spearheaded by Nintendo and its Mario Kart World pricing, is irritating and exhausting when 4-5 games will now be the cost of an entire console by themselves.
This is what's going to happen, however. The dam has broken. In a year and a half at most, you are going to see practically all AAA games priced at $80. There is fan theorizing about Borderlands 4 publisher Take Two trying to push that even further for the release of GTA 6, the biggest game of all time, seeing if they could get to $100 or more.
However, this leaves room for smaller games and smaller studios to shine. The highest rated games of the year are $50 or under, including GOTY frontrunner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 along with Blue Prince and Split/Fiction. So that's an opportunity there.
It's a bad tweet. It also reflects an unfortunate reality that's coming no matter what.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
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