Borderlands 3 is 95% off on Steam right now, dropping it to just $3—its lowest price ever, and one of the best deals in the 2025 Steam Summer Sale. And somehow, that screamingly good price has turned into yet another opportunity for Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford to annoy Borderlands fans on social media.
“Sales like this and Borderlands 3 showing up on console subscription programs took over 5 years from the game’s launch to happen,” Pitchford wrote on X. “Take advantage when it’s here!”
Good advice—Borderlands 3 has been around since 2019 so there’s a good chance you’ve already got it, but if you don’t, hey, three dollars. Thank you, Randy, for bringing this to our attention.
But he could not help himself, and continued: “And to set expectations, it will be even longer before this kind of thing happens in the next cycle with Borderlands 4.”
To be fair, I think that’s pretty innocuous too, and quite possibly accurate, unless Borderlands 4 bombs for some reason, and at this point it seems unlikely. PC Gamer’s Tyler Wilde spent a few hours playing a pre-release build in May and found it not transformative, but solidly consistent—which I think is what a lot of Borderlands fans want.
At the same time, while it’s probably too much to describe Pitchford’s message as a gently implied threat, there’s a lot of residual sensitivity over Borderlands 4 pricing out there courtesy of Pitchford’s prior social media hoedown, in which he needlessly floated the spectre of a potential $80 cost for the game. That ultimately came to nothing, but not before a week of throwing hands with randos over it.
So I suspect some of that was reflected in some of the responses to Pitchford’s more recent message—sparked not by the likelihood that Borderlands 4 won’t see any sort of deep discount for years to come, but because Randy just will not stop picking at the scab.
“You and your team make some of my favorite games, but you make it really hard to like you when you spit crap out like this. It’s like you never learn,” Tanner_AZ303 replied.
“I swear he is absolutely terrible at marketing,” Alacod1 wrote. “Why did this need to be said like this?”
“U really do like to throw water on your own fire Randy,” Smokininja added, while MaqApple suggested, “I think you just need to work on your wording boss.”
It spirals down from there, as threads on X tend to: A few messages are supportive of Pitchford’s urge to “help,” a few are outright abuse, some expressed doubt that it will really take all that long for Borderlands 4 to get the deep sale treatment, and of course there are all sorts of individual requests or demands of the game.
There are also complaints about both Borderlands 3 and BL4 being “spyware,” a sensational allegation spurred by a recent change to Take-Two Interactive’s EULA that spawned a review bombing campaign across the entire Borderlands series earlier this month. Those claims no doubt also helped prompt some of the negativity in the reactions to Pitchford’s message.
To Pitchford’s credit and detriment in equal measure, he’s posting through it, cheerfully responding to messages good and bad—in some cases clarifying his position, and in others just messing with people a bit. I know that urge, and I respect his commitment to it, but his willingness to wade into the fray (and apparent inability to avoid stepping on rakes) is what leads to this sort of thing.
Will it have any sort of material impact on the success of Borderlands 4? Probably not. Even so, as Lincoln put it last month, “choosing not to tweet is often the wiser decision.” But what fun is that, right?
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