Gearbox development chief Randy Pitchford says it’s impossible to break the Borderlands 4 servers this weekend through sheer weight of player numbers alone — and he’s so confident he’s publicly promised that Borderlands 4 won’t join the long list of big AAA games whose online systems fail at launch.
Borderlands 4 launched earlier this week and immediately saw a concurrent player count on Steam bigger than all the other prior Borderlands games. At the time of this article’s publication, Borderlands 4 had seen an impressive peak of 252,530 players on Valve’s platform, with the peak weekend playing time to come.
For context, Borderlands 2 set a Steam peak concurrent player count of 124,678 13 years ago, with Borderlands 3 hitting a peak of 93,820 five-and-a-half years ago, and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel reaching 68,238 10 years ago. Borderlands Game of the Year Edition has a peak of 23,655.
Pitchford took to X / Twitter to address concern about Borderlands 4’s ability to hold up over this weekend, making a promise gamers aren’t used to hearing from developers.
“So here’s the thing with this… We are VERY confident in our backend on-line infrastructure and systems. And we’re off to an insane start — record breaking,” he said.
“But we know from past experience that peak numbers will start really hitting over this weekend. You’re going to be hammering our on-line infrastructure and some people are nervous if our on-line systems can handle the numbers you will be throwing at us.
“But here’s the thing: our on-line team rules.”
Pitchford is taking the opportunity to encourage as many people as possible to play Borderlands 4 this weekend, and so Gearbox is offering the Break Free Pack to all who play the game from September 12-14. This includes 1 Vault Hunter Skin usable by Vex, Rafa, Amon, and Harlowe, and 1 Legendary Ripper Shield, which scales to your Vault Hunter level when redeemed (with a minimum of Lvl 25).
Pitchford said he “wanted to see if we could motivate everyone to log in this weekend to see how far we can stress the system,” which is why the free pack was created.
He continued in typically confident fashion:
“Listen — I’m telling you that it’s going to be VERY unlikely you guys can be enough people to break the backend and take our game down. I know there have been some high profile backend on-line systems failing around big AAA game launches, but not this one.
“I am THAT confident.
“That said, IF concurrency *does* break our systems, I’ll find a way somehow to reward everyone and to make it up to everyone for showing me that it can break. And, you’ll have helped expose something that we will need to make stronger, so… win-win.
“So here it is… I’m throwing down the gauntlet: you cannot break our on-line infrastructure through too many players. You can’t. Hacking doesn’t count, btw. Just concurrent players in the game is what we’re looking for. Play cooperatively; jump into random people’s games; log in and out a bunch of times at peak hours… Whatever you can fairly and reasonably do within the game to add pressure to the system, do it!”
While Borderlands 4 is off to a big start in terms of player numbers, it’s not entirely plain sailing for Gearbox. The release was marred by complaints about PC performance that have resulted in a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Valve’s platform. The complaints revolve around poor performance even on high powered PCs, with some affected by crashing that makes the game difficult to even start.
In response, Gearbox posted a Borderlands 4 Nvidia Optimization guide on Steam, advising players how to optimize their graphics settings for “better performance and framerates” on PC with the Nvidia app.
Gearbox then issued a piece of advice to PC gamers that to me reads like an effort to prevent players from making knee-jerk reactions to the game’s performance as soon as they’ve changed their settings: “Please note that any time you change any of your graphics settings, your shaders will need to recompile. Please keep playing for at least 15 minutes to see how your PC’s performance has changed.”
If you are delving into Borderlands 4 don’t go without updated hourly SHiFT codes list. We’ve also got a huge interactive map ready to go and a badass Borderlands 4 planner tool courtesy of our buds at Maxroll. Plus check out our expert players’ choices for which character to choose (no one agreed).
Photo by Monica Schipper/WireImage.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
