Borderlands 4 doesn’t have an official price yet, but there’s plenty of speculation that it will go the way of Mario Kart World and sport an $80 price tag. When asked about the price at PAX East, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford gave a long answer about why pricing isn’t his call to make, and how those on the publishing side are weighing all the options when it comes to pricing.
Pitchford was much more curt when responding to a fan on X, though. He reiterated to someone pleading with him not to make Borderlands 4 $80 that the price was not his call and that a “real fan” would find a way to buy it, even if it ends up being $80.
Commenting on Pitchford’s post about the Creator’s Voice video for Borderlands 4, X user oldgoldsot wrote, “Randy, this game better not be 80 dollars. Don’t take that risk, alot of gamers aren’t gonna pay 80 dollars and feed this notion of constant increase of the price tag You are the CEO, you have some say with the price when it comes to your publisher.”
Pitchford’s response boiled down to telling users to pull up their bootstraps if the $80 price tag is too high for them.
“A) Not my call. B) If you’re a real fan, you’ll find a way to make it happen,” Pitchford wrote. “My local game store had Starflight for Sega Genesis for $80 in 1991 when I was just out of high school working minimum wage at an ice cream parlor in Pismo Beach and I found a way to make it happen.“
It’s not the best reply, if only because Oldgoldot’s original complaint is more to do with the idea that players, like themselves, will vote with their wallet against games jumping up to $80. Whether they were a ‘real fan’ had nothing to do with it, and they didn’t believe that Pitchford had absolutely no say when it came to pricing, as the chief executive officer at Gearbox.
Nintendo was the first to break the $70 ceiling by bumping up Mario Kart World to $80, followed by Microsoft increasing the price of its games and hardware. PlayStation has bumped up the price of its services and hardware across the world, and while it hasn’t seemingly done the same with its games, keeping Ghost of Yotei at $70, it’s realistically only a matter of time.
Take-Two might have held back with Mafia: The Old Country with a much lower-than-expected price of only $50, and it might hold back again with Borderlands 4, opting not to jump up to $80 but stay at $70. Regardless, it’s unlikely that it will cost less than $70. When Borderlands 3 launched in 2019, it did so at the then-standard $60 price. So players should expect to pay at least $70 for Borderlands 4.
But they shouldn’t have to expect to be told to “make it happen” by studio bosses when the prices go up, especially when everything, including the cost of things more important than video games, is going up.
