Borderlands 4's pricing was announced weeks after Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford said "if you're a real fan" you'll find a way to buy the game if it turned out to be $80. And after the controversy and subsequent apology over that comment, the game is $70. However, the Deluxe and Super Deluxe editions cost $100 and $130 respectively, presumably for the "real fan" to buy.
The Gearbox Twitter account elaborates that "we have a huge slate of post-launch content planned, including free content drops and updates," while the Borderlands account explains what's to come in the more expensive versions of the game with one of those tables that break down everything.
The Deluxe edition comes with the Bounty Pack Bundle, which includes "four unique areas, missions and bosses" and "vault card with unique challenges and rewards" along with cosmetics and weapons. Meanwhile the more expensive edition comes with the Vault Hunter Pack, which seems more in-line with a full-blown expansion, with new vault hunters, map regions, and story missions being added.
A fan on Twitter pointed out that the Bounty Pack Bundle sounds similar to the Headhunter Packs from Borderlands 2, which were small DLC packs that added little missions to the game along with a few cosmetics. And Gearbox confirms that yes, these are going to be similar to Headhunter Packs.
"Bounty Packs are going to be similar to Headhunter Packs from Borderlands 2 with Vault Cards and extras!" it writes. "We'll be talking about this and the rest of our post-launch plans prior to launch!"
Of course, when you look at the cost of the Borderlands 2 Headhunter Packs, they were $2.99 each, so all five of those were just under $15 in total. So forgive me for saying that four Headhunter Pack equivalents for Borderlands 4 being $30 on top of the game sounds like a real bad deal. I'm sure Gearbox expects that the "real fan" will gladly go all-in on it, but if we're talking about the same scale as Headhunter Packs, $5 extra for each pack seems a bit much.
