Gearbox Boss Blames Old Hardware for Borderlands 4 Performance Issues, Says It’s a “Premium Game Made for Premium Players”
Borderlands 4 launched this past week, and although it has received general praise from audiences, many have pointed out the technical issues surrounding it. Well, Gearbox’s founder, Randy Pitchford, has finally taken to addressing those issues, though not in the way that many PC gamers were hoping for.
Rather than offering any understanding of the issues and stating that they were looking into it, he instead called buyers “4K stubborn” and noted that the problem lies in having outdated hardware.
Gearbox Boss Randy Pitchford Has No Time for Peasants; Tells Gamers to Get a Refund Rather Than Have a “Subpar Experience”
Over on X (formerly Twitter), Pitchford replied to a gamer who said “It’s great you’re offering help. Woulda been better to build it for the most common hardware in the first place.”
Pitchford’s reply? Stating that Borderlands 4 “is a premium game made for premium gamers,” which is another way of saying you’re poor, and the game is for rich players.
“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 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. And some have actual issues we need to fix. And some need to learn how their PC’s work at the high end for this specific game in 2025 and use the tools available to them to find the right balance between frame rate, resolution, and graphics features. This is not a game made to run on 10 year old PC’s – this game uses the full capabilities of modern bus, CPU, and GPU. If you’re trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower’s motor, you’re going to be disappointed. If you discover your system can’t run the game well by accident or wishful thinking and/or don’t want to try to mess with settings to make things good enough for you, please use the refund feature on Steam rather than have a subpar experience,” Pitchford said.
Pitchford wasn’t done there, as he added, “I know a lot of you are dead set on playing at 4k with ultra max settings and using two or three year old hardware. You do you, but BL4 and UE5 are doing a lot and for me that trade off for frames isn’t worth it. I play at 1440p with settings super high and am super happy with that trade off – the game looks amazing at 1440p. If you’re not 4k stubborn and just want to have a great, fun time with higher perf, please consider running at 1440p resolution. If you’ve got a beast of a video card, you’re probably fine at 4k. But if you’re in the middle or close to min spec, I would definitely recommend making that trade.”
Now I don’t want to be the guy who pretends to know everything about game development and the technical details behind it all. I, like many other gamers, am a consumer and can only go based on what I see. Looking at Borderlands 4, I’m sure there’s more technical stuff going on behind the scenes than I can imagine, but it’s also hard to believe that this is the game pushing gaming to its limits.
Pitchford Deflecting Sounds Callous in the Face of Borderlands 4’s Performance Woes
The big issue is that Randy tries to deflect the feedback by saying things like If you have a beast card, then you’ll be fine playing at 4K. The thing is, there are plenty who are running the game with either an RTX 4090, 5080, or 5090, and are still running into major performance issues, even when aiming for 60 FPS. Unless you game with frame-gen, which can achieve frame rates in the hundreds, you’re basically out of luck from having any stable experiences on those cards.
In many ways, DLSS and frame generation are being used as a crutch to deliver an acceptable experience, rather than enhance an already great experience. Not to mention the added latency that may bring, something I have noticed in many other games on PC. Some PC gamers don’t like the idea of “fake frames,” and to me, it speaks a lot whenever anyone tries to make that a requirement to achieve levels that should have been optimized already.
Nonetheless, even the higher-end GPU/CPU systems are struggling with performance at ultra and even at lower settings. The minimum requirement on the GPU side is an NVIDIA RTX 2070, with a good chunk of Steam players using an RTX 3000 series card, and the recommended being an RTX 3080 at 1440P 60 FPS at medium settings. The thing is, even players with an RTX 3080 have reported struggling to run Borderlands 4 at 1080P with medium and lower settings with a stable framerate.
On a closed system like the PS5 and PS5 Pro, we have noticed performance issues, likely due to a memory leak, as the problem worsens over time until the game is restarted.
There are plenty of examples that show this is actually a problem with the game, with many meeting the recommended requirements and still struggling. Having a rocky launch is understandable, especially on PC, considering how many different spec systems there are. But, being just a few days after release, I’m not sure if the immediate blame should be placed on gamers, and I think this is where many are getting frustrated over the whole situation.
Mind, as a game, Borderlands 4 is great (at least I’m having fun); however, it’s understandable that there has been backlash over performance issues, especially on Steam, where the game currently sits at only 66% positive reviews out of 15k submitted reviews. Far too often, we see this happen with games that are generally good, but are brought down because of technical issues on Steam. It’s a big market, and of course, not everyone is having these issues, but it does speak volumes on the platform when you see so many low-rated scores. Players want to be able to enjoy the game they bought, but when those issues are met with what appears to be some resistance and blame shifting, I can understand why some are getting really heated over this.
We’ll keep monitoring the game as always, and hopefully the next major patch addresses some of these big performance issues some are having.
In related news, Gearbox released a patch for Borderlands 4 on PC, and while it does help the game’s performance, it also manages to make the game crash for a lot of players.
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