Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford took some heat when he dismissed concerns about Borderlands 4 potentially launching with an $80 price tag, saying on X that “if you’re a real fan, you’ll find a way to make it happen.” Today, in an effort to calm the roiling waters left in the wake of that ill-advised statement, he shared a brief video clip he described as “the truth” about Borderlands 4 pricing, and the “reality” of the rising costs of videogame development.
The clip was actually recorded a couple weeks ago at PAX East, but Pitchford reshared it because it’s definitely relevant to the controversy of the moment, and provides a slightly more nuanced take on the matter of game pricing. Pitchford begins by saying he doesn’t know what the price of Borderlands 4 will be, but then dips into why higher prices across the board are almost certainly on the horizon.
“On one level we’ve got a competitive marketplace where people that make those [pricing] choices want to sell as many units as possible, and they want to be careful about people that are price sensitive,” Pitchford says in the clip. “So there’s some folks that don’t want to see the prices go up—even the ones deciding what the prices are.