Randy Pitchford does customer service on social media to help with Borderlands 4 performance issues

Gearbox chief Randy Pitchford hasn’t taken the criticism on Borderlands 4’s performance issues overly well, taking to social media to passive-aggressively help out players with their set-ups and post long threads about how it’s actually people’s own fault that the title is not running well.

He advised one person to “code your own engine and show us how it’s done, please,” which is a bit like being told to cook your own meal by a restaurant’s chef after being served moldy bread.

In another thread, he stated that “every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing.” This was promptly community-noted, the note explaining that it’s, in fact, the game publisher’s responsibility to provide customers with accurate minimum and recommended specifications — something 2K Games and Gearbox seemingly haven’t done, since a lot of players have problems running Borderlands 4 at optimal performance on machines fulfilling the recommended requirements.

Pitchford also told people to stop being “dead set on playing at 4K with ultra max settings and using two or three year old hardware.” 

“With Borderlands 4, every PC gamer has a LOT of tools to balance their preferences between FPS, resolution, and rendering features. If you aren’t happy with the balance between these things you are experiencing, please tune to your preferences using the tools available to you,” he added. “Use DLSS. It’s great.”

Borderlands 4 reached a new all-time peak of concurrent users on Steam yesterday with over 300,000 players and its initially negative user ratings have been recovering steadily, so there’s some truth to what Pitchford has been saying about there being a big discrepancy between the online perception and real data like the number of filed customer service tickets.

“This reality is dramatically different than what you would expect if your only sources of information were, say, certain internet threads,” he wrote. In which case it might be beneficial if he were to put down his phone instead of pouring gasoline over the fire.

While Pitchford is busy arguing with PC players, there’s some good news for console players at least: Gearbox is working on adding an FoV slider, which was a baffling feature omission in the first place.

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