Overlook

It is with a heavy heart and a note of regret that I inform you (those of you who have blessedly managed to avoid this knowledge thus far, at least) that Randy Pitchford is at it again.

I’ll spare you the specifics of the Gearbox boss’s latest social media escapades (if you’re interested, Nathan Brown had a very entertaining write-up in Hit Points this week), but the gist is simple. The company’s new game, Borderlands 4, has launched with some fairly significant performance issues, and Pitchford chose to address these in part by telling consumers that this is their own fault for not knowing how to use their PCs properly.

Not great! As it turns out, some of the performance issues also extend to consoles – for now, the suggested solution for what appears to be a memory leak causing performance to get worse and worse over time is to periodically reboot your console.

Gearbox is being much more constructive about fixing the issues than Pitchfork’s ill-tempered posting would suggest, too, quickly issuing a patch that fixed a few of the issues, and the studio is presumably working hard on further improvements. (The game itself, by all accounts, is very good once you get past the performance problems.)

Borderlands 4 has reviewed well, but users have reported PC performance issues | Image credit: Gearbox Software/2K

A company boss ill-advisedly lashing out at his own consumers is deserving of rolled eyes, but not of too much attention – any discussion focusing on that aspect is inevitably going to be far more heat than light.

This whole affair doesn’t live in isolation, though; it’s just the latest chapter in the ongoing narrative of not one, but two of the biggest bugbears consumers have with the games business.

The first of those is something of a closed case, even if it remains a source of intense annoyance for many consumers. I refer to the whole question of the validity of shipping games that are clearly broken in some key technical ways, with the intention of quickly patching them after launch.

The perception of games as an expensive hobby is arguably the single biggest threat facing the industry right now

That’s a debate and a source of frustration that’s as old as the ability to patch games itself. I have some sympathy for the old-school view that we were all better off back when console games lived on a read-only disc or cartridge and couldn’t be patched, given the extent to which that capacity is now abused.

The argument overall was lost many years ago, though, and if anything platform holders have become increasingly permissive about the technical state of software releases and the use of day-one patches. PC, of course, has always been the Wild West in this regard anyway.

What is much more pressing, and far more active, is the discussion over game pricing and the cost of gaming as a hobby. Pitchford waded into that a while back by arguing that real fans of Borderlands would pay $80 for the game, though it did eventually launch at $70. Whether he intended to or not, his latest comments also jab directly on that exposed nerve.

The perception of games as an expensive hobby is arguably the single biggest threat facing the industry right now. The facts about inflation and development costs are much less important than the perception and emotions around this topic. Consumers shifting to a belief that games are expensive and overpriced undermines one of the key pillars of the medium’s appeal, namely its excellent value in terms of entertainment received for money paid.

“Why am I going to spend $80 for this game when Fortnite is here?” asked Circana’s Mat Piscatella in a recent analysis of game pricing | Image credit: Epic Games

We’ve talked a lot in the past few months about console pricing, and AAA game pricing, and even the potential re-engagement with “whale” strategies as a recession countermeasure for some games. Alongside these, it’s also worth discussing the occasionally staggering increases in the cost of PC hardware, especially since PC gaming is often presented as a refuge from the rising prices of console hardware and software.

Rising PC hardware costs are nothing new. The cost of many key components, especially of GPUs, has been climbing for years, and the incremental benefits of upgrades have not always been impressive. The run on GPUs for cryptocurrency mining priced many gamers out of that market in particular.

The rise of AI hasn’t had quite the same effect (not least since Nvidia has pushed out chips and devices that are more optimised for AI tasks than consumer GPUs), but it has helped to ensure that prices didn’t get a chance to drift back downwards after the crypto rush. New GPUs now can cost comfortably double or triple the price of a PS5 or Switch 2, even for relatively mid-range cards.

That wouldn’t be a huge problem if PC games addressed a wide range of specs, including being optimised for lower-spec machines running older hardware. That’s not an entirely unreasonable ask, given the prevalence of devices like laptops and Steam Decks. Notably, it’s precisely what Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney called for recently, noting that many developers create games for the highest-spec systems and then don’t put sufficient time and resources into optimising for lower-spec hardware.

Tencent Games’ Yong-yi Zhu has emphasised the importance of targeting low-spec PCs | Image credit: Tencent Games

In fact, the situation is arguably worse than Sweeney suggests in some key regards. A lot of new games are going in quite the opposite direction – leaning so heavily on upscaling technologies like DLSS and frame generation for performance as to be practically unplayable on a lot of systems without those technologies enabled.

That’s a problem, because those generative-AI-based technologies mostly require new hardware – GPUs from the last couple of generations, for example, are required for the best versions of both the relatively uncontroversial DLSS and the much more questionable (by which I mean that even to my untrained and myopic eye it looks like absolute rubbish in many games) frame generation tech.

High-end PCs will always be around and will always be a desirable status symbol for gamers. However, PCs can and should also be the industry’s strongest pitch for the affordability argument. They’re capable gaming devices that many, many people already own. You can play games on them through affordable storefronts without buying any expensive new hardware.

It’s a huge risk for the industry if we lose that possibility for PCs to function as entry points

That ought to be incredibly powerful positioning for the platform, but it means embracing low-spec systems, laptops, and yes, even Macs – which are pretty solid gaming devices in their own right now, and incredibly ubiquitous among college-age consumers who are a key demographic for the industry.

The ability to swim upstream and spend thousands on expensive GPUs, VRR capable monitors, and enough RGB lights to send your Christmas tree into early retirement has to be an option for the devoted few, not table stakes for getting involved in PC gaming.

It’s a huge risk for the industry as a whole if we lose that possibility for PCs to function as entry points for new consumers and good-value-for-money devices for those with lower spending power. That’s exactly what’s at risk if a failure to optimise for lower end systems becomes too widespread – leaving consumers with a bad taste in their mouth and a sense that they have to upgrade to play recent games.

Needless to say, it’s Tim Sweeney’s solution that’s by far the more workable approach; getting on social media to blame the gamers themselves for that situation helps nobody.

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