Borderlands 4 "may be in a whole new level here," Randy Pitchford declares as the action RPG sets a series Steam concurrent player record within 24 hours of launch despite 'Mixed' reviews

Borderlands 4 is out and it's doing incredibly well. Its PC version has an 84 on Metacritic and it smashed the series' peak concurrent player record on Steam already, just one day after it launched.

In our own Borderlands 4 review notes it's "undeniably an excellent looter-shooter, but one that requires a bit of tunnel vision to fully enjoy." The combat is praised highly, but the story and villain fell flat for our reviewer.

Over on Steam, Borderlands 4 already hit a peak of 207,479 (thanks, SteamDB), shattering Borderlands 2's old record of 124,678. Looking at these figures, Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford tweets: "Around Borderlands 3 launch, we reached peak concurrency on the Sunday evening after a Tuesday launch. We may be in a whole new level here breaking records early."

But, the Steam reviews are currently sitting at 'Mixed' despite the large number of players. Most negative reviews mention poor performance, and a lot of those point the finger at poor Unreal Engine 5 optimization.

It seems Pitchford anticipated this, as he did implore "everyone to have realistic expectations for performance" a few days ago. "This is a big, open AAA game and lower end and older hardware may not perform as well," he says.

One player using a Radeon RX 6900 XT, which came out in 2020 and retails for several hundred dollars pre-owned, writes, "Terrible, terrible performance. Worst I've ever seen. Turned it down to Low graphics presents and couldn't hit 60 FPS, even with FSR upscaling."

With so many people playing on so many different hardware configurations, hopefully Gearbox can spend some time optimizing the game. It does beg the question of how well the Switch 2 version will run, though.

In the meantime, check out all our Borderlands 4 tips to help you make the most of your time on Kairos.