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Borderlands 4 boss tells players "please get a refund from Steam if you aren't happy" as Randy Pitchford continues his very public crashout over the FPS's performance woes (www.gamesradar.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/games@lemmy.world
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[–] 136 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (10 children)

Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid? Never heard of the guy before, but he seems to behave like a petty little child throwing a tantrum for something that is obviously his or some of his near colleagues fault. Comparable level of stupidity to "Do you guys not have phones?" lol.

I think they would be better of by just ignoring or at least appeasing the crowd with something.

Edit: I read into some of his key moments as a person and comments he made on the topic. Yikes. Maybe he is trying to appeal to edgy kids so they nag their parents to buy better hardware. Maybe his brain got quadruple-A-fried over the years. But then again, maybe he is just another CEO asshole and has always been lol. It's a shame, Borderlands 1 and 2 were great games back then. Just let a good game rest in peace, there is no need and no sense in milking every last drop out of every successful series. /rant

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  • [–] 128 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Never heard of the guy before

    Lucky you. Randy has a long history of being an insufferable asshole

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  • [–] 34 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Pretty much. Can't remember what he did that ticked me off like 8 years ago.

    I stopped buying and surprise surprise, got everything after Borderland 2 for literally free or like $2-3 at some point.

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  • [–] 37 points 11 months ago*

    There was his crashout before Borderlands 2 where Gearbox accepted a boatload of Sega money to help finish Colonial Marines, and instead outsourced the project. Gearbox kept the money in spite of the failure, and allegedly used it as funding for Borderlands 2. (They were sued by Sega for keeping the cash, but later dropped the suit)

    He also crashed out during the Borderlands 3 leadup.

    Groped the Claptrap VA 6 years ago because he was tired of voicing Claptrap "as a favor" and when offered normal market rates wanted more because Claptrap is iconic. Pitchford cornered him at the hotel elevator, grabbed the VAs junk and said "youre gonna do what I tell you to" -allegedly.

    Other than that, about the same time, he left a thumb drive at a Medieval Times that had company secrets and squirt porn on it. Same thumb drive. Brother apparently can't afford 2 thumb drives to keep his porn separate from his company secrets.

    Pitchford is the problem with Gearbox, but as a whole he's a far cry from being Rockstar or Nestle, so it doesn't cross people's Ick threshold to trigger boycotts.

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  • [–] 19 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    But then again, maybe he is just another CEO asshole and has always been lol.

    When you fire everyone that disagrees with you, it doesn't take long to loose the ability to handle criticism.

    Like, there's a very good chance this guy has had absolutely nothing but praise while "working" on this game. So now that people whose job doesn't depend on making him feel like a genius are giving feedback, it literally breaks his brain.

    He most likely genuinely believes the game is perfect and all the criticism is from "trolls and haters" who are just lying because their jealous of his genius.

    There's a reason this attitude is so pervasive among the wealthy.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Now that I think about it, that has been one of my two blanket explanations for rich people being assholes.

    The other one being the mix-up of correlation and causation (or even just the direction of causation). Money arguably does make you a worse person, but also being a bad person usually can make you a lot of money in the first place.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago

    That feeds back into what I was saying, it's the same thing.

    The first couple times you dick someone over for money, you're gonna feel bad.

    But everyone at the company is going to pat you on the back and say you're a genius cuz numbers went up.

    Anyone who says it wasn't worth the numbers going up, gets fired.

    The wealthy live in a bubble where the only people they interact with only care about money

    Our whole capitalist society is a giant feedback loop that concentrates wealth and strips the wealthy of their humanity.

    It's not like there's some problem where something is broken, this is the natural and logical result of how we've spent the last couple generations

    Unregulated capitalism always ends in an oligarchy with most people penniless

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, I'm a longtime Borderlands fan who follows what's going on with the franchise, and Randy just acts like a child who inherited a video game company. He usually says this dumb shit with a smile on his face, so I think he's intending it to be in good fun, but it just does not come across that way.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    No, in fact at this point, I struggle to imagine what value he could possibly provide his employer that could match or exceed the damage he's doing. Certainly, everywhere I've worked in the games industry he'd have been out on his ass... some time ago. I clearly must be missing something. Who knows?

    I mean, he's the CEO, but there must be a board and a group of investors he's answering to.

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  • [–] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I think they would be better of by just ignoring

    I mean the best thing they could do is to acknowledge that the game could use some optimization and promise to continue working on it. Even if they have no intention of doing so. But that might get them in trouble with Nvidia since they slapped an "Nvidia optimized" badge on it.

    The worst thing they could do is say "buy a better PC".

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Exactly, like what CDPR did with Cyberpunk - own up to the fact that it was shit on release, then take the time to fix it and update it. People flipped nearly overnight from having a negative opinion of the game to a positive one when they released the working version of the game (plus a really solid DLC, which probably helped too).

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago

    Can someone find an excuse for how this behaviour is not just extremely short sighted / plain stupid?

    It’s not. It works because he’s always operated like this and keeps getting away with it. People keep sucking up his garbage games so why should he change?

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago*

    I’ve seen a few people speculate that it’s some 3D chess marketing move.

    I think it’s just immaturity and an inability to take criticism. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, as they say.

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