Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford believes Borderlands 4 is worth over double its price, although he would ‘give it away’ if he could.
The price of games has been a sensitive topic over the past year, with Mario Kart World’s £74.99 price tag sparking hysteria and the cost of GTA 6 being a hot debate among analysts.
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford found himself in a similar storm when he insisted ‘real fans’ of Borderlands 4 would ‘find a way’ of paying for the sequel if it cost £80. He later apologised for his remarks, before it came out that Borderlands 4 will actually cost £70, in line with other high-end titles, when it launches on September 12, 2025.
While the average person may have learnt to avoid the topic entirely, Pitchford has now discussed the value of Borderlands 4 in an interview, saying it is worth over double the standard edition price.
‘S**t, I think they could charge $200 (£150),’ Pitchford told Gamesradar. ‘I wish they’d give it away, because then everyone would play it.’
‘That’s not how the business works,’ he added. ‘But the value is there.’
Pitchford doesn’t actually decide the price (that’s on publisher 2K), but he goes onto explain how, in his opinion, Borderlands games are worth far more than they’re sold for.
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‘The truth is, when you talk about Borderlands,’ he added. ‘Like, I don’t know how I can say this and sound as if I have any amount of humility. Borderlands 4 is amazing. It’s absolutely an incredible game, and the value is undeniable.
‘You look at all the past Borderland games, we have people that spend thousands of hours in The Borderlands. If you think about that in terms of the most amount that could have ever been spent versus the time of entertainment, you can’t find a better value in the world for any kind of entertainment.’
While the argument that playtime equals value is a slippery slope (is a film worth more money if it’s longer?), there’s certainly an imbalance between the development costs of big budget titles today and their retail price.
Borderlands 4 might be a good value proposition across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, but the Nintendo Switch 2 version, set to launch on October 3, 2025, has some missing features and downgrades.
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