Key Highlights
- Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has called out PC gamers.
- This was in response to Borderlands 4’s optimization woes.
- Randy has maintained that the game requires premium hardware to run well.
Despite managing to break Steam records and garner a fair number of positive review scores along the way, Borderlands 4 has had a rough launch week. The reason is quite simple – optimization, or its lack thereof.
Borderlands 4 runs horribly across most PC hardware, including the likes of even the RTX 5090. Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford’s recent comments on the same have added more fuel to the fire, where he suggested that Borderlands 4 was a ‘premium game made for premium gamers’. The internet has quite naturally not taken to this kindly, and with good reason.
Randy Pitchford Doubles Down on PC Optimization Claims
It’s no secret that Borderlands 4 suffers from a plethora of optimization related issues, all of which seem to stem from its usage of Unreal Engine 5. The game runs quite poorly, and Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford has received a ton of criticism regarding the game’s current state.
The minimum and recommended specs are published. The most common hardware is a four year old cell phone. Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers. Just as Borderlands 4 cannot run on a PlayStation 4, it cannot be expected to run on too-old PC hardware. Unlike on…
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) September 13, 2025
Randy had previously spoken out about these ‘so called optimization issues’, which were painfully obvious when you peeked into the game’s Steam user reviews page, where it sits with a mostly Mixed score currently.
In a rather odd X post, Randy has claimed that ‘Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers’, in an attempt to justify both its pricing and steep PC system requirements.
According to Randy, the game does not have a PS4 or Xbox One port for a reason, and PC gamers should not expect to be able to run the FPS using ‘sub optimal hardware’. This is while acknowledging that they have some ‘actual issues’ that need to be fixed, and commenting that the game cannot work on ‘10 year old PCs’.
It is quite the claim, given that not even an RTX 5090 can render the game at a good enough frame rate with its current build. These comments have quite naturally not been taken to kindly by the player base, many of whom were quick to point out the false narrative.
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Doubling down on these claims of optimization, Gearbox’s CEO also mentioned that players are free to use the refund feature on Steam if they feel inclined to do so, while maintaining that players need to mess with the game’s settings to smoothen out the experience for themselves.
Borderlands 4 Is in Desperate Need of a Patch
Even the mighty AMD RX 9070 XT (which also happens to be AMD’s flagship GPU for the year, in addition to arguably being the best value for money card in 2025) barely manages to run Borderlands 4.
The game run with an average of 69 FPS, accompanied by a rather concerning 1% low of 57 FPS, which would have been acceptable if it were running at 4K native. Unfortunately, this takes into account a 1080p native resolution (with no upscaling or frame generation) and the ‘Badass’ preset.
The same is true for Team Green as well, and not even the much hyped RTX 5000 series can run the game reliably.
Having your game rely on both frame generation and upscaling to deliver somewhat playable frame rates is nothing short of disappointing, and should not be the benchmark for modern games.
No game should mandate astronomically high PC system requirements that are out of the reach of a majority of its player base. Even more so when we consider that the games themselves look barely any better when compared to their last-gen counterparts.
This is while not taking into account the numerous bugs and crashes one can experience while trying to run the game. Borderlands 4 is in desperate need of an update, and each day wasted only serves to boost the resentment of players.
