In the wake of several PC players complaining about some of the technical issues present in Borderlands 4, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has taken to social media to tell these players to simply refund the title if they aren’t enjoying it. Pitchford’s statement comes in response to a Borderlands fan complaining about the newest title in the series having performance issues, and how features like DLSS and frame generation shouldn’t be required to hit stable frame rates.
In his response, Pitchford also drew a comparison between the performance issues of Borderlands 4 and putting a Ferrari engine into a monster truck, and how this ultimately won’t let the monster truck go any faster since the vehicle wasn’t designed with the engine in mind.
“You can do whatever you want,” wrote Pitchford. “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 optimize your performance.”
In the same statement, Pitchford also wrote about Gearbox having optimised Borderlands 4 to feel fine while playing at 30 FPS, and feel great while playing at 60 FPS. He also mentioned that the PC version of the title offers several options that players can tinker with to make the right level of trade-offs with regards to the visual fidelity of the game and the frame rate they might want. In his post, Pitchford also wrote about DLSS being an important feature to ensure that Borderlands 4 performs on PC.
“I’m sorry you don’t like being told to use DLSS, but that is the way,” he wrote. “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 optimize to your taste. Would you like help tuning your experience better to your liking?”
This long post is only part of a larger series of posts that Pitchford has been making on social media, where he implied that PC players are expecting too much in terms of performance for Borderlands 4. In the series, he also wrote about the variety of options that can be tweaked to get higher frame rates, how resolutions can be lowered, and how DLSS is great for Borderlands 4 because it isn’t a competitive shooter, so input lag from frame generation shouldn’t ultimately matter.
Borderlands 4 came out just last week on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The title is also head to Nintendo Switch 2 on October 3. For more details about the game, check out our review.