It wasn’t just Randy; the whole studio thinks like this.
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Gearbox doesn’t seem to see Borderlands 4 as a live service game.
Community member HellenTK asked creative director Graeme Timmins an interesting question. He said this:
Out of curiosity,
If we take away all cues to BL4 in the cadence of current content/updates we are left with:
•Weekly recap article
•Weekly patch + notes
•Rotating weekly endgame activities
If I asked a Destiny player if this was D2 or another game, the answer 99.99% of the time would be D2.
Does the team internally have a stance on if BL4 is a “live-service” or something else/combination of multiple things?
Timmins said this in response:
I’d say we are game with some Live service like trappings, but not a truly live service title. People playing BL4 get a game that is updated frequently, with additional free content over its life, without any heavy monetization structures.
We just love making our work better.
Why Did The Fans Think Borderlands 4 Is Live Service?
There is an elephant in the room here, and its name is Bungie. When Bungie decided to leave Microsoft and the Halo franchise, they had a blank slate on what kind of game they wanted to make next.
And Bungie surprised everyone when the answer turned out to be Destiny. Destiny and Destiny 2 are looter shooters just like Borderlands, with a stronger emphasis on online multiplayer.
Another big difference is that Bungie would shift the game through the years from a full retail release to a free-to-play model. Even the franchise’s high-concept sci-fi story was deprioritized in favor of a game that expected players to keep coming back and kept offering content.
There are a lot of differences between Destiny and Borderlands. But the one that matters here is that Gearbox did not make that shift that Bungie did. Why is that?
Borderlands’ Identity Is Why It Is Not Live Service
As Randy Pitchford has retold several times, Borderlands’s fundamental game idea wasn’t about the loot itself. It was a coming together of the RNG and character-building elements of PC adventure RPGS, and the more action-oriented boomer shooters. He had this germ of an idea way back when he was a teen experiencing these game genres for the first time.
Because of this line of thought, Pitchford argues that they don’t have good competition in the looter shooter space. Their competitors have focused on how to monetize their looter shooters even further. But Gearbox’s focus is on making the game so engaging that players just keep playing.
What we learned from Graeme Timmins here is that this was not just something Pitchford said for himself. This really is how Gearbox sees their franchise.
Borderlands has seen its ups and downs, and it has never peaked the way Destiny peaked. But even now that fans lament the lack of a Borderlands 4 endgame, it’s plain to see that Gearbox still has a far more promising future than Bungie does. Maybe that’s because they were more focused on iterating on the genre they invented, and challenging themselves on that.
