Game delays are a common part of life in videogames, but game advances—where a game’s release date is moved up instead of back? Not so much. It happens, but it’s a rarity—in most cases, developers are hammering away on games practically right up to the moment of their release. So eyebrows understandably went up yesterday when Gearbox moved up the release of Borderlands 4 by more than a week, from September 23 to September 12.
The immediate and obvious question was why, and there was really no answer forthcoming. Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford said it was just a matter of development going really, really well, which is great to hear but come on: Are you really going to short yourself 11 days of dev time just because you can—especially when the release is still five months out?
Announcement about the Borderlands 4 launch date – Please watch until the end: pic.twitter.com/cF85jG1p09April 29, 2025
Immediate suspicion for the “real” reason fell on other games, and the urge to avoid them: Bungie’s extraction shooter Marathon is also slated for release on September 23, and that could certainly be an issue.
But the real 4D chess players turned their thoughts to the possibility of Grand Theft Auto 6 kicking the door down around the same time. It’s currently got a fall 2025 release window and while that’s awfully vague, Gearbox—like Rockstar—is a Take-Two studio, so it might have the inside track on what’s coming, and thus might be doing a quick shuffle up the calendar to avoid being stepped on like a bug. Which is no disrespect to Borderlands 4—everything that tries its luck in close proximity to GTA 6 is going to be stepped on like a bug.
Pitchford, however, says unequivocally that’s not the case.
“Borderlands 4 shipping early is 100% the result of confidence in the game and development trajectory backed by actual tasks and bug find/fix rates,” he wrote on X. “Our decision is literally 0% about any other product’s actual or theoretical launch date.”
That’s clear enough, and frankly I’m not buying it. Not entirely, anyway: The denial is firm but until Take-Two commits to a solid GTA 6 release date—for consoles, recall, a PC version still isn’t confirmed at this point—I’m going to allow myself just a little bit of conspiracy theory fun, as a treat.
We may not ever really know what’s going on behind Take-Two’s closed doors (unless it announces a September 23 release date for GTA 6, in which case I think we can all make some safe assumptions), but we’ll get a closer look at Borderlands 4 itself later today, April 30, at the Borderlands 4 State of Play showcase beginning at 2 pm PT/5 pm ET/10 pm BST on Twitch and YouTube.
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