Pitchford says Borderlands 4 is for "premium gamers" after performance backlash

Borderlands 4 has a lot to prove. The series' third instalment wasn't exactly to everyone's liking, and while I enjoyed Dungeons and Dragon-inspired spinoff Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, it was ultimately a fun, fleeting diversion rather than a full sequel. And that's without mentioning the absolutely diabolical movie, which currently sits at a harrowing 10% on Rotten Tomatoes. Ouch. At first glance, however, Borderlands 4 looked like it could be the turning point for Gearbox's looter shooter franchise, but as players have poured in and began to explore Kairos, they've encountered myriad performance issues, hence the 67% rating on Steam.

While a new Borderlands 4 update has attempted to right various performance wrongs, and our hardware team has been hard at work identifying handy workarounds to the biggest issues, pretty much every negative Steam review mentions optimization problems. "Love how modern day games cant be bothered to be optimized anymore, and they still want 70$," writes one: a sentiment that's echoed throughout myriad other reviews.

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has responded on X by offering potential fixes over the FPS game's launch weekend to try and help players out. Consistently, across multiple posts, he states that some older rigs simply won't be able to run the game. "Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers," he writes. "Just as Borderlands 4 cannot run on a PlayStation 4, it cannot be expected to run on too-old PC hardware."

Things appeared to reach a peak on Saturday September 13, where, in response to a post saying "or, just an idea here, make your game look good without relying on AI upscale," Pitchford writes "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 companies and tech companies working with the world's greatest real time graphics engine coders don't know what you seem to know." While Pitchford ends the post by making it abundantly clear he's being sarcastic, his response has unsurprisingly attracted even more negative attention, especially in the wake of his infamous "if you're a real fan, you'll find a way to make it happen" comment regarding the game's price.

While Pitchford goes on to post other hardware-focused tweets, which our team of tech magicians are breaking down right now, it's always a choice to clap back at your customers. Hopefully further patches will help with the game's optimization, but it may be worth waiting for now if you want a frustration-free experience.

PCGamesN was not supplied with code for Borderlands 4 prior to launch, but we'll be bringing you lots of coverage over the coming weeks. If you do happen to be playing now, we already have a list of all the currently active Borderlands 4 Shift Codes so that you can grab some Golden Keys, as well as a rundown of all the Borderlands 4 characters and which one to pick.

Are you having issues with Borderlands 4? Let us know over in our Discord server.