Borderlands 4 creator blames your PC for game’s performance issues

Gearbox’s CEO has rebuked complaints around Borderlands 4 on PC, claiming only a ‘few real issues’ are affecting a ‘very small’ amount of players.

Borderlands 4 has been officially released and despite racking up over 300,000 concurrent players on Steam, its launch hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing.

At time of writing, the looter shooter carries a ‘Mixed’ rating on Steam, with 33% of over 16,000 reviews being negative. The bulk of these have problems with the game’s performance, citing crashes, stuttering, and other issues. We certainly had problems with crashes in our review.

It seems to be a problem on console too, with a number of players reporting issues on PlayStation 5. Others have also complained about the lack of FOV (field of view) slider on consoles, which developer Gearbox has acknowledged as something they are ‘exploring’ for a future update.

While there’s no news on a console patch for the performance issues, Gearbox rolled out a patch for PC on Saturday to ‘help improve stability for a wide range of PCs’.

Despite this patch, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has since posted a lengthy thread on X, in response to ongoing complaints about the game’s performance on PC – placing the blame on everyone but himself.

‘Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what software they are running is doing [sic],’ he wrote on X.

‘We have made an amazing game and fun and huge looter shooter campaign game. The game is pretty damn optimal – which means that the software is doing what we want without wasteful cycles on bad processes.

‘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 experiencing, please tune to your preferences using the tools available to you.’

Later in the thread, Pitchford describes the game as ‘doing a lot and running pretty optimally’, adding that players ‘may have to either accept some trade offs between FPS, features, and resolution as your preference or you will continue to be disappointed’.

Pitchford does eventually acknowledge there are some issues with the game but, according to him, only for a small minority: ‘There are a few real issues, but they are affecting a very, very small percentage of users,’ he added. ‘We are fixing those and many are already fixed.

‘We are also doing significant work on PC performance and, well, everything else that is coming at us. We’re not stopping.’

He goes on to encourage PC players having issues to make ‘trade offs’ between the frame rate and resolution, as well as utilising DLSS, aka AI upscaling technology.

You might think if Borderlands 4 was well optimised for PC, it wouldn’t require so much explanation to get it running well for a notable amount of players. However, Pitchford has been posting potential solutions on X since the game launched.

After someone criticised the game for ‘relying on AI upscale’ to make the ‘game look good’, Pitchford, riled by the comment, responded in sarcastic fashion.

‘Code your own engine and show us how it’s done, please,’ he replied. ‘We will be your customers 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. /sarcasm.’

As a relevant aside, Gearbox didn’t send out review codes for Borderlands 4 to some outlets prior to launch, including Eurogamer, which is always a clear sign that a publisher knows there’s something wrong with their game – technically or otherwise.

Nobody was sent a console version to review, with Metacritic currently only logging one press review across PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

It’s unclear what this means for the Nintendo Switch 2 version, which is set to launch on October 3, although we’d hold off from taking the plunge until reviews have rolled out – which could be some time after launch.

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