Borderlands 4 launched on Steam with a record result for the entire franchise. Over the weekend, the online shooter from Gearbox Software exceeded 300,000 concurrent players — twice as many as the previous record holder in the series, Borderlands 2.
According to Steam data, Borderlands 4 took first place in the global sales chart, ahead of Counter-Strike 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and other popular titles.
For comparison: Borderlands 2 reached a peak of 124,678 concurrent players, and Borderlands 3 reached 93,820. At the same time, the third part was an Epic Games Store exclusive at the start, which limited its statistics on Steam. Borderlands 4 is also available on EGS, so the real number of players on PC may be even higher.
The game was released on September 12 on PC and a day later on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. The version for Nintendo Switch 2 is expected on October 3.
After the release, users began to massively complain about technical problems: freezes, unstable FPS, and inflated system requirements. In response to criticism, Gearbox head Randy Pitchford published a series of posts where he stated that the scale of the problem was exaggerated and largely related to inflated expectations.
According to Pitchford, Borderlands 4 is "quite optimized," and the complaints are the result of incorrect settings and incorrect expectations from part of the audience. He clarified that the studio was aiming for a stable 30 FPS with minimum and 60 FPS with recommended system requirements, and also urged to actively use DLSS and other scaling technologies.
Nevertheless, many negative reviews have already been published on Steam, in which technical problems are named as the main disadvantage. Despite this, after the release, the overall user rating leveled out and now stands at 65% positive reviews, corresponding to the status of "mixed."