Borderlands 4 boss tells players "please get a refund from Steam if you aren't happy" as Randy Pitchford continues his very public crashout over the FPS's performance woes (www.gamesradar.com)
from mintiefresh@piefed.ca to games@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 10:25
https://piefed.ca/post/226532

#games

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passepartout@feddit.org on 17 Sep 10:53 next collapse

Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid? Never heard of the guy before, but he seems to behave like a petty little child throwing a tantrum for something that is obviously his or some of his near colleagues fault. Comparable level of stupidity to “Do you guys not have phones?” lol.

I think they would be better of by just ignoring or at least appeasing the crowd with something.

Edit: I read into some of his key moments as a person and comments he made on the topic. Yikes. Maybe he is trying to appeal to edgy kids so they nag their parents to buy better hardware. Maybe his brain got quadruple-A-fried over the years. But then again, maybe he is just another CEO asshole and has always been lol. It’s a shame, Borderlands 1 and 2 were great games back then. Just let a good game rest in peace, there is no need and no sense in milking every last drop out of every successful series. /rant

lath@piefed.social on 17 Sep 10:55 next collapse

Musk/Trump type wannabe.

Zanshi@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 10:55 next collapse

Never heard of the guy before

Lucky you. Randy has a long history of being an insufferable asshole

bytesonbike@discuss.online on 17 Sep 11:31 next collapse

Pretty much. Can’t remember what he did that ticked me off like 8 years ago.

I stopped buying and surprise surprise, got everything after Borderland 2 for literally free or like $2-3 at some point.

Exusia@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 13:36 collapse

There was his crashout before Borderlands 2 where Gearbox accepted a boatload of Sega money to help finish Colonial Marines, and instead outsourced the project. Gearbox kept the money in spite of the failure, and allegedly used it as funding for Borderlands 2. (They were sued by Sega for keeping the cash, but later dropped the suit)

He also crashed out during the Borderlands 3 leadup.

Groped the Claptrap VA 6 years ago because he was tired of voicing Claptrap “as a favor” and when offered normal market rates wanted more because Claptrap is iconic. Pitchford cornered him at the hotel elevator, grabbed the VAs junk and said “youre gonna do what I tell you to” -allegedly.

Other than that, about the same time, he left a thumb drive at a Medieval Times that had company secrets and squirt porn on it. Same thumb drive. Brother apparently can’t afford 2 thumb drives to keep his porn separate from his company secrets.

Pitchford is the problem with Gearbox, but as a whole he’s a far cry from being Rockstar or Nestle, so it doesn’t cross people’s Ick threshold to trigger boycotts.

slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org on 17 Sep 12:27 collapse

He’s the poster boy for being successful while being the dumbest guy in every room he enters.

fluxion@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 11:03 next collapse

Present times have shown us that a lot of CEOs are incompetent idiots with mental disorders

xxce2AAb@feddit.dk on 17 Sep 11:11 next collapse

No, in fact at this point, I struggle to imagine what value he could possibly provide his employer that could match or exceed the damage he’s doing. Certainly, everywhere I’ve worked in the games industry he’d have been out on his ass… some time ago. I clearly must be missing something. Who knows?

I mean, he’s the CEO, but there must be a board and a group of investors he’s answering to.

Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 11:12 next collapse

Yeah, I’m a longtime Borderlands fan who follows what’s going on with the franchise, and Randy just acts like a child who inherited a video game company. He usually says this dumb shit with a smile on his face, so I think he’s intending it to be in good fun, but it just does not come across that way.

passepartout@feddit.org on 17 Sep 11:18 next collapse

Could as well be the case. Would fit to the general theme of the series lol.

ShadowRam@fedia.io on 17 Sep 12:37 collapse

right?

Randy Pitchford has been this way for years.

I guess its news to some people Randy shooting off his mouth.

givesomefucks@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 11:47 next collapse

But then again, maybe he is just another CEO asshole and has always been lol.

When you fire everyone that disagrees with you, it doesn’t take long to loose the ability to handle criticism.

Like, there’s a very good chance this guy has had absolutely nothing but praise while “working” on this game. So now that people whose job doesn’t depend on making him feel like a genius are giving feedback, it literally breaks his brain.

He most likely genuinely believes the game is perfect and all the criticism is from “trolls and haters” who are just lying because their jealous of his genius.

There’s a reason this attitude is so pervasive among the wealthy.

passepartout@feddit.org on 17 Sep 14:09 collapse

Now that I think about it, that has been one of my two blanket explanations for rich people being assholes.

The other one being the mix-up of correlation and causation (or even just the direction of causation). Money arguably does make you a worse person, but also being a bad person usually can make you a lot of money in the first place.

givesomefucks@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 14:15 collapse

That feeds back into what I was saying, it’s the same thing.

The first couple times you dick someone over for money, you’re gonna feel bad.

But everyone at the company is going to pat you on the back and say you’re a genius cuz numbers went up.

Anyone who says it wasn’t worth the numbers going up, gets fired.

The wealthy live in a bubble where the only people they interact with only care about money

Our whole capitalist society is a giant feedback loop that concentrates wealth and strips the wealthy of their humanity.

It’s not like there’s some problem where something is broken, this is the natural and logical result of how we’ve spent the last couple generations

Unregulated capitalism always ends in an oligarchy with most people penniless

Dojan@pawb.social on 17 Sep 13:07 next collapse

Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid?

It’s not. It works because he’s always operated like this and keeps getting away with it. People keep sucking up his garbage games so why should he change?

Ulrich@feddit.org on 17 Sep 13:20 next collapse

I think they would be better of by just ignoring

I mean the best thing they could do is to acknowledge that the game could use some optimization and promise to continue working on it. Even if they have no intention of doing so. But that might get them in trouble with Nvidia since they slapped an “Nvidia optimized” badge on it.

The worst thing they could do is say “buy a better PC”.

the_artic_one@programming.dev on 17 Sep 15:15 next collapse

I think that sticker just means you sent Nvidia a pre-release build so they had time to add game-specific hacks to their drivers before your launch.

zalgotext@sh.itjust.works on 17 Sep 20:16 collapse

Exactly, like what CDPR did with Cyberpunk - own up to the fact that it was shit on release, then take the time to fix it and update it. People flipped nearly overnight from having a negative opinion of the game to a positive one when they released the working version of the game (plus a really solid DLC, which probably helped too).

Ulrich@feddit.org on 17 Sep 20:24 collapse

I still think it’s fucked up that CDPR and so many others have a “release it now, fix it later” mentality, but yes, at least they owned it.

Pika@sh.itjust.works on 17 Sep 17:21 collapse

I hadent heard of him until BL4 was released, but man does he seem like a real big piece of work lol

psx_crab@lemmy.zip on 17 Sep 11:08 next collapse

[Gabe Dislike That]

Ulrich@feddit.org on 17 Sep 13:26 collapse

Gabe not even noticing from 1 of his 6 superyachts

Snailpope@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 11:19 next collapse

I literally thought an in game boss was telling you to get a refund

LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 17 Sep 11:31 collapse

That would be comical. Breaking the 4th wall, boss talking shit. Get a refund you suck at this, while you’re at it throw your PC in a lake, fish play better.

Nikls94@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 12:13 next collapse

Dude that’s some serious Sans stuff

Flagstaff@programming.dev on 17 Sep 12:22 next collapse

Oh, Sans is smarter than that; he’d say how you can’t refund because you’ve already played for way more than 2 hours to get this far. If anything, he would mention your actual playtime statistic in his dialogue.

Lemmynated@lemmy.zip on 17 Sep 12:54 collapse

The games called Serious Sam.

josefo@leminal.space on 18 Sep 02:10 collapse

To make it perfect, the boss should appear right after the two hour mark is met, so you actually can’t. The boss should also use that material. Modern day metal gear solid is they also manage to pull user owned games and game data from steam API or something.

cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 17 Sep 11:23 next collapse

I don’t get it. Borderlands 1 ran at like 720p (less?) on native hardware (Xbox 360) and it looked great, mostly because of the cel-shaded graphics. Cel-shaded was code (maybe still is) for low-res and it covers it up well. So I feel like anyone trying to push 4K Borderlands (Gearbox, or players) is in the wrong here and that may be part of the problem. Now if Borderlands 4 can’t run at 1080p or 1440p on good hardware… that’s Gearbox’s problem to fix. Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as Animal Crossing at 8K — apparently that has been accomplished with a very powerful computer and an emulator. (AC for Switch is not performance locked to hardware, it’ll scale up to whatever you can run it on.) But it just begs the question “fucking WHY?”.

I feel like the discourse around Borderlands 4 should be “is it fun” followed at a great distance by “is the story compelling enough to draw me in?” I did not have plot expectations for the first one, and it exceeded them.

Disclaimer: played and beat BL1 and all its DLC. Dabbled in 2 and 3. Have not played BL4 yet. Looking forward to a Siren play on my Series X at some point, but not now.

brucethemoose@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 11:39 collapse

Trying to run Borderlands at 4K sounds about as stupid to me as…

On the contrary, it should be perfectly runnable at 4K because its a 2025 FPS game and the cel-shaded graphics should be easy to render.

‘Unreal Engine’ is no excuse either. Try something like Satisfactory rendering literally thousands of dynamic machines on a shoestring budget with Lumen, like butter, on 2020 GPUs, and tell me that’s a sluggish engine.

This is on Gearbox, who’ve developed on Unreal for 2 decades. And ‘sorry, we’ll work on it’ would have been a fine response…

CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 11:51 next collapse

My understanding is that Unreal is a garbage engine for optimization at face value, it has a lot of useful tools and a lot of incorrect/dated documentation for those tools some of which are also just kind of configured wrong as their default settings. If effort is put into optimization to configure things correctly and only use the various tools like nanite or lumen in their actual use cases (rather than just throwing them on everything) you can get some pretty fantastic optimization.

TLDR: Good but complex tools marketed as low effort with bad defaults and exagerated marketing.

brucethemoose@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 12:04 collapse

Gearbox has developed on Unreal Engine since 2005. They have ~1,300 employees.

I’m sorry, I know game dev is hard. But if small, new studios can get it to work, Gearbox should get it to fly. They have no excuse.

cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 17 Sep 11:52 collapse

Right because Cyberpunk looks amazing in 2025 and it ran like shit five years ago at launch.

But 4K gaming is more demanding than people realise and gaming companies shouldn’t be getting so much flak for it.

brucethemoose@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 11:56 next collapse

Honestly Cyberpunk’s raytracing runs like poo compared to Lumen (or KCD2 Crytek) compared to how good it looks. I don’t like any of the RT effects but RT Reflections; both RT shadows options flicker, RT lighting conflicts with the baked-in lighting, yet doesn’t replace it if you mod it out.

Most of Cyberpunk’s prettiness is there from good old rastarization, more than most people realize.

PTGI looks incredible, but it’s basically only usable with mods and a 4090+.

acosmichippo@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 15:17 collapse

why are we comparing a game 5 years ago to one released today? hardware is much more capable now.

paraphrand@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 16:15 collapse

Eh, I guess it is. But it also isn’t. We have stagnated a bit in the rasterization and VRAM departments when you talk about affordable entry level cards that most people buy.

And the PlayStation 5 has not changed since it launched…

Sure, newer cards have Ray Tracing stuff and new video encoder pipelines and some other things. But when you look at classic rasterization, and look at xx60 and xx70 class cards, it’s not the sort of leaps we use to have. Node shrinks are not what they use to be.

A 3060 is as fast as a 2070 super. Just as an example I have first hand experience with. There use to be much larger performance gaps between generations.

zalgotext@sh.itjust.works on 17 Sep 20:22 collapse

You shouldn’t need leaps in hardware to render a highly stylized cell shaded video game in the year 2025.

paraphrand@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 21:35 collapse

Yeah, but it’s not just a toon shader/cel shaded shader.

I’ve seen footage, this game has full (highly stylized) PBR and all sorts of fancy lighting along with the cell shaded look. Reducing it all to “cell shading” isn’t the whole story.

Hi-Fi Rush is much closer to classic Borderlands than BL4 is.

zalgotext@sh.itjust.works on 17 Sep 21:57 collapse

Right, I’ve seen the footage too, and I don’t think I’d recognize it as a Borderlands game if the name wasn’t included in the ads. I’m struggling to understand why they chose to go that route, rather than sticking to the beloved, iconic, performant art style of the other games in the series.

paraphrand@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 21:58 collapse

That’s a fair take. I’m sure they feared looking dated. I think that’s a misguided fear that you have when you don’t think the other aspects can live up to expectations.

Which is weird because it sounds like they tried really hard with the story, as in they tried to elevate it beyond the usual dick and fart jokes and snark. (They didn’t eliminate that stuff, but rather tried to have a balance) BL3 was terrible in that dept. it went way too hard on that shit imo.

banazir@lemmy.ml on 17 Sep 11:39 next collapse

Seems like the kind of guy I’d want in charge of my company. “Don’t buy my stuff” is some next level 4D marketing.

paraphrand@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 16:19 collapse

He probally knows only a certain percentage of his audience will ever hear about this.

Red_October@piefed.world on 17 Sep 12:31 next collapse

This guy is why PR consultants and Social Media teams exist. Some people just should not have contact with the public. However good he might or might not be in his work on the project itself, someone should have told him to sit down and shut up and let someone who knows how not to damage the entire game with a single statement handle the communication.

banazir@lemmy.ml on 17 Sep 15:04 next collapse

I generally have nothing but a deep sense of loathing for marketing, but I genuinely feel bad for the people who have to try smearing lipstick on this pig.

ripcord@lemmy.world on 18 Sep 00:13 collapse

Is it really that bad?

I’m not much of a fan of the series, but the complaints I’m seeing are in the “I only get 30fps instead of 60fps on ultra!” kinds of things that make me roll my eyes super hard

Anarch157a@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 18 Sep 01:28 collapse

The eye rolling would be justified if the 30FPS was on something like a 3070 or something like that, but when the complaint comes from someone sporting a 5090, well…

If the game runs at 30FPS on the latest, greatest top-of-the-line card from Nvidia, imagine what kind of performance people are getting from 4060s or RX6600s…

A game that’s this badly optimised is a disrespect to all gamers.

ripcord@lemmy.world on 18 Sep 14:28 collapse

Is that what the situation is? I think that’s also only the case on 4k with brutal mode enabled or whatever.

Obviously that’s still not great if so, but I’d still put it in the eyeroll category personally. I don’t really feel butthurt if I have to run at 1080p or enable vlss or not get 120fps or whatever, especially on day 1 for a game.

But I come from an era where there were games you had to shrink some 3d games lower than 320x200 to get a playable 10fps, so I’m also probably feeling some “back in my day we walked uphill both ways - kids today” energy here. What do I know.

frongt@lemmy.zip on 17 Sep 15:47 collapse

Problem is, there’s no such thing as bad press. Here we are talking about it.

Killer57@lemmy.ca on 17 Sep 15:54 next collapse

Yep, talking about how I will never buy a gearbox game.

Red_October@piefed.world on 18 Sep 08:11 collapse

"There's no such thing as bad press" is such a dogshit saying that is demonstrably untrue. There is absolutely bad press, just because we're talking about it doesn't mean it's good for the product. For every one schmuck who thinks they'll buy Borderlands 4 just to prove how good their computer is, there's a hundred people who have decided never to buy it at all and half if them have written off gearbox entirely.

bungle_in_the_jungle@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 12:42 next collapse

He’s right. Refund it and don’t bother supporting him again. Simple!

huquad@lemmy.ml on 17 Sep 19:50 next collapse

I disagree. Don’t buy it to begin with lol

deczzz@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 17 Sep 21:57 collapse

Exactly. I don’t get why people even cares about what this dude is saying. Dont like the game? Refund it ffs.

Soup@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 22:20 collapse

They care because people that haven’t bought it should know that these issues don’t seem to be getting better. They should know that their money would be going to that asshole’s pockets. This shit matters and you wanting to plug your ears to discomfort doesn’t change that.

LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com on 17 Sep 13:14 next collapse

Overrated franchise has dogshit legacy sequel. More news at 11.

Einhornyordle@feddit.org on 17 Sep 14:29 next collapse

I guess the most hated man on the internet had a point when he called Randy out for having shitty takes

AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 14:45 collapse

Who is the most hated man on the internet? I thought that was me.

bitjunkie@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 15:06 collapse

<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a22d6d9f-4708-4d48-ac2e-a6dab6e3741c.png">

AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 15:08 collapse

Is that someone from Mad Men? I don’t watch much TV.

NotKyloRen@lemmy.zip on 17 Sep 16:04 collapse

Yes. It’s a clip from the show/meme where the other guy in the elevator says, “I feel sorry for you”. Then the guy in the picture above says, “I don’t even think about you.”

AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 16:09 collapse

Ahh, fair enough. I’m guessing that was a response to my joke

NotKyloRen@lemmy.zip on 17 Sep 19:05 collapse

I think it was just as much of a joke-y response. Kind of like saying, “who the hell are you, anyway?”

FalseTautology@lemmy.zip on 17 Sep 16:05 next collapse

Randy has inspired me to purchase the game and immediately refund it. Thanks Randy!

CallMeAnAI@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 18:49 next collapse

CRASH! SLAMMED! POPPED!

njm1314@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 19:28 next collapse

Man I don’t know how the board of directors is going to feel about the CEO telling people to refund their game. That seems like it would be on the list of things you don’t want your CEO telling people.

big_slap@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 19:58 collapse

it got the community manager for helldivers 2 fired, so… 🍿

inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 20:34 next collapse

Dude is a never ending source of stupidity.

So it’s been reported that the PS 5 suffers from performance issues, especially during long play periods due to being perfectly optimized and this is his latest response:

“Known issue of perf dropping on PS5 pro after several hours of continuous play,” he said. “Workaround until we patch: Quit game and restart. Sorry for the friction!”

Zahille7@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 20:57 collapse

I mean, he’s an airheaded out-of-touch fellow-kids piece of shit, but he’s not entirely wrong about restarting a game if it starts getting fucky after several hours of continuous play.

Also, I’d suggest to just about anyone that they should probably at least get up and walk around, maybe get some fresh air, if you’re gonna be gaming all day. Your devices need breaks too.

treesquid@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 21:08 next collapse

He’s not wrong, but a game you have to do that to isn’t made very well.

BeardedBlaze@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 22:09 next collapse

Lol @ devices need breaks too. What an absolute nonsense.

Suburbanl3g3nd@lemmings.world on 17 Sep 22:15 collapse

If you’re cold, they’re cold. Bring them inside

inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 22:39 next collapse

Honestly for a new game three or for hours sessions on a game like this is pretty normal and people are saying that it’s a constant drop in performance after just an hour or two and continues to get worse until your running like your in a 1070.

And no these consoles and computers are not expected to need a break after just a two hours of running, that’s not how good applications work.

chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world on 18 Sep 01:57 collapse

Devices don’t “need breaks”. This problem is indicative of a memory leak, which means they coded something shitty.

Sure, playing for 7 hours straight is excessive, but this shouldn’t happen.

vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works on 18 Sep 02:06 collapse

The only games I know of that need to restart every once in awhile are Paradox games and ultra modded Bethesda games. Paradox because sometimes the game needs a restart to let the AI reprioritize and for Bethesda it’s because of memory leaks that become a problem after too many mods. The fact that Borderlands 4 is that bad out of the box is fucking sad.

morphballganon@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 20:43 next collapse

Hey board of directors! Make me your new CEO and I will fix this problem!

DegenerationIP@lemmy.world on 17 Sep 20:52 next collapse

Damn, that all is Comedy and insanely ridiculous.

People wanted this Game so Bad. They fucked up a bit … and the CEO goes banana. What a sad ending to this

Fizz@lemmy.nz on 17 Sep 21:19 collapse

Borderlands really didnt deserve another chance after the shit games theyve released but it seems people fell for.the marketing and gave it one anyway. Now the same thing is happening the game is shit and was sold at a ridiculous price and while you’re sitting there trying to scrap together some enjoyment youve got this asshole Randy hitting headlines daily.