Gearbox Software co-founder Randy Pitchford put his foot in his mouth this week, which is how you know Borderlands 4‘s release is getting close. Like Mariah Carey emerging each Christmas, Pitchford seems to appear every time a new title in the long-running looter-shooter Borderlands series is near launch to say something that makes everybody mad. It’s tradition.
Real Fans? Or Rich Fans?
This time, Pitchford grabbed headlines by responding to a fan saying that Borderlands 4 shouldn’t be $80, saying, “If you’re a real fan, you’ll find a way to make it happen.” At first, I wondered if the headlines reporting on this had removed some of the context that would make Pitchford’s statement sound more reasonable. But nope, here’s the whole tweet.
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.
Is it true that a franchise’s biggest fans will pay more than other customers to get their hands on certain products? Mario Kart World selling like hotcakes despite its own $80 price tag indicates that they will. If GTA 6 ends up retailing, as persistent rumors suggest, for $100, it will still probably be the biggest entertainment launch in history. When people want something bad enough, they’re willing to pay more for it.
But you can’t price every product with the assumption that it is the one thing that people want to pay extra for, especially not right now at a time when inflation has been taking a toll and tariffs are set to add to the squeeze.
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Sorry Borderlands 4, But I’m Not Paying $80 To Be Considered A “Real Fan” Of Anything
Gearbox Software founder Randy Pitchford has landed himself in hot water while talking about Borderlands 4.
The Rent Is Too Dang High
A recent study from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity found that 60 percent of Americans don’t make enough to afford basic costs of living. That analysis doesn’t just include rent and food, but the other expenses that are “necessary for well-being, growth, and upward mobility”. So, necessities that are less immediately necessary than food and shelter. Things like Wi-Fi, a laptop, work clothes, healthcare, transportation, childcare, and other basic costs are factored into LISEP’s estimate, as a way of going beyond “traditional headline economic indicators like GDP and unemployment [which] tell us the economy is thriving”.
“Americans are working harder than ever, fueling our [country’s] economic growth, but the benefits of that hard work are not being distributed in a way that supports upward mobility for too many middle- and low-income Americans,” the project’s chairman, Gene Ludwig, says in a statement on its website.
So, when Pitchford says that fans can spend $80 for games because his “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” he’s comparing apples and oranges. The average rent in California at that time was about $620 (or $1220 in 2020 money). The average rent in California in 2025 is $2,518. When the average cost for shelter is roughly double the price it would be if simply adjusting for inflation, the price of a video game going up — even if it’s ‘fair’ — is going to be too much for many consumers.
As a multiplayer shooter, Borderlands 4’s biggest competition isn’t other full-priced games. It’s free-to-play titles like Apex Legends, Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2, Overwatch 2, and others. I don’t know about the “real fans”, but for the many players who just want something to do with their friends, $80 is going to be a tough sell.
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