Worried the impending arrival of $80 games might price you out of your favourite hobby? Well if Borderlands 4 follows suit, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has suggested the community should just suck it up and deal with it. “If you’re a real fan,” he recently told a potential purchaser, “you’ll find a way to make it happen.”
Pitchford made the proclamation on social media after a Borderlands fan opined, “Randy, [Borderlands 4] better not be $80. Don’t take that risk, a lot of gamers aren’t gonna pay $80 and feed this notion of constant increase of the price tag. You are the CEO, you have some say with the price when it comes to your publisher.”
But Pitchford begged to differ. “Not my call,” he replied, before dismissing pricing concerns. “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 parlour in Pismo Beach and I found a way to make it happen.”
The response from Borderlands fans on social media was, unsurprisingly, swift, strong, and overwhelmingly negative. “Thanks, now I won’t buy the Game even if it costs $70”, one person wrote, while another added, “That has to be one of the worst CEO replies from recent memory.” Another called Pitchford’s comment an “elitist [and] out of touch”; “Rich person says just find the money,” added another, with plenty more using considerably stronger language.
Of course, none of this means Borderlands 4 will cost $80 dollars when it eventually arrives, but the industry certainly seems to be heading in that direction. Nintendo got the ball rolling earlier this year, when it announced a $79.99 USD price tag for Mario Kart World on Switch 2, and Microsoft was quick to follow suit, saying some Xbox game prices would rise to $79.99 at the end of 2025 – presumably in time for this year’s Call of Duty.
Notably, however, Borderlands 4 publisher Take-Two has taken a relayed a more cautious approach to price increases, with CEO Strauss Zelnick recently reiterating the company’s stance on variable, game-by-game pricing. While some analysts have speculated next year’s GTA 6 might reach $100 territory, one of the few confirmed prices on Take-Two’s upcoming roster is Mafia: The Old Country, which costs $50, and Borderlands 4 pricing details are yet to be shared.
But while customers might balk at the rising cost of games, former PlayStation exec Shuhei Yoshida recently suggested the move was inevitable. “I think it was going to happen sooner or later,” he explained earlier this month in the wake of Mario Kart World’s price reveal, “maybe not from Nintendo, but it was going to happen eventually. We live in contrasting times, where inflation is real and significant, but people expect games that are ever more ambitious and therefore expensive to develop to cost the same. It’s an impossible equation.”
As for Borderlands 4, that’s set to launch for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on 12th September after Take-Two announced it was bringing its release forward. And remember, no matter how much it costs, “If you’re a real fan, you’ll find a way to make it happen.”