Gearbox CEO Confronts Players Over Borderlands 4 Performance Issues, Challenges Them To Code Their Own Game Engine

By Elijah Gonzalez | September 15, 2025 | 4:54pm

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Gearbox CEO Confronts Players Over Borderlands 4 Performance Issues, Challenges Them To Code Their Own Game Engine

The early reviews for Borderlands 4 are in, and they’re mostly positive, barring one major issue: rough PC performance. Experts and Steam reviews alike have complained that the game is full of stutters as new assets load and that it runs at much lower framerates than it should relative to other games. While these kinds of issues have become tightly associated with games that run on Unreal Engine 5, that doesn’t stop people from understandably being upset when their $70 purchase runs poorly.

And while these kinds of Day 1 problems usually result in studios scrambling to make amends, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has taken a very different approach: challenge these players to make their own game engine.

In response to a user criticizing the game’s reliance on DLSS (a technology for using AI for improved performance), Pitchford responded, “Code your own engine and show us how it’s done, please. We will be your customer when you pull it off. The people doing it now are clearly dumb and don’t know what they’re doing and all the support and recommendations and code and architecture from the world’s greatest hardware companies and tech companies working with the world’s greatest real time graphics engine coders don’t know what you seem to know. /sarcasm”

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In another thread, Pitchford wrote that “Borderlands 4 is a premium game made for premium gamers,” and that “this is not a game made to run on 10 year old PC’s – this game uses the full capabilities of modern bus, CPU, and GPU. If you’re trying to drive a monster truck with a leaf blower’s motor, you’re going to be disappointed.”

Pitchford elaborated on this in a separate post: “Every PC gamer must accept the reality of the relationship between their hardware and what the software they are running is doing. We have made an amazing and fun and huge looter shooter campaign game. The game is pretty damn optimal – which means that the software is doing what we want without wasteful cycles on bad processes. With Borderlands 4, every PC gamer has a LOT of tools to balance their preferences between FPS, resolution, and rendering features. If you aren’t happy with the balance between these things you are experiencing, please tune to your preferences using the tools available to you.”

While Pitchford is admittedly civil in most of his posts and promises that his team will work to optimize the game further, his response has many players disappointed that he isn’t owning up to the fact that “this one does seem to be running worse than usual for an Unreal Engine 5 game,” as Digital Foundry’s John Linneman put it. “It is below where it seems like it should be given how other games using this engine perform.” When the head of a game company denies that their game has a problem to begin with, it doesn’t exactly bode well for the patching process.

Borderlands 4 is just the latest Unreal Engine 5 game with noticeable performance issues. Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic (which created the engine), also deflected blame, stating that these issues are development studios’ fault. Regardless of where the blame lies, it’s clear that it’s been a bit rough to be a PC player as of late.