As criticism of Borderlands 4’s technical performance continues, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has told players to “get a refund from Steam if you aren’t happy with it”.
Since Borderlands 4’s release last week, Pitchford has been on a tirade on social media in defence of the game calling it “pretty damn optimal”.
In his latest post, Pitchford stated every PC gamer “must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing”, effectively placing responsibility on individual players to perform their own optimisations.
Official Story Trailer | Borderlands 4Watch on YouTube
One player responded “Your product doesn’t meet the standards” and said it took days to get the game to a tolerable state.
“You can do whatever you want,” Pitchford replied. “The game is the game. Please get a refund from Steam if you aren’t happy with it.
“You made an analogy to a vehicle. I would not put a Ferrari engine in a monster truck and expect it to drive like a Ferrari. If you tell me about your specification, I can help you optimise your performance. I’m sorry you don’t like being told to use DLSS, but that is the way. If you’re not happy using the tools available to you to improve frame rate and you’re not happy with the frame rate you have, you should play a different game.
“The game is awesome and it is designed to be just fine of an experience at 30fps and feel great at 60fps. We also have provided a lot of options for you to make different trade offs between frame rate, resolution, and graphics features than we would make and we encourage you to use those tools to optimise to your taste. Would you like help tuning your experience better to your liking?”
Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing.
— Randy Pitchford (@DuvalMagic) September 15, 2025
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Despite performance issues across both PC and console platforms, Borderlands 4 is proving popular. On Steam alone it’s reached a concurrent player count of over 304k (though this remains behind Hollow Knight: Silksong).
The official Borderlands account released some player stats such as items looted and bosses defeated, with Pitchford adding: “Holy bananas you guys played a LOT of Borderlands 4 over the weekend. The backend on-line services all held, which is what we hoped would happen!”
It also looks like a POV slider could be added for console players, following complaints of motion sickness.