Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford says "I think they could charge $200" for Borderlands 4, "you can't find a better value in the world for any type of entertainment," then adds: "I wish they'd give it away, because then everyone would play it"

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has been sparring with people online for a while now about how much Borderlands 4 costs – it launches at $70 on September 12 – but he seemed glad to keep talking dollars with GamesRadar+ during this year's Gamescom Day 1. To him, Borderlands 4 offers plenty of value for money.

"Shit, I think they could charge $200," Pitchford tells us, but "I wish they'd give it away, because then everyone would play it."

"That's not how the business works," he continues. "But the value is there."

Pitchford has been personally involved in many public discussions about $70, $80 games – with varying degrees of making Borderlands fans exceedingly angry. So he's confident that these conversations "honestly don't matter in the big picture. The sum of every conversation that ever happened on social media about the price of a video game, and every article that was ever written – in truth, you add that all up, and it won't change anything with the result.

"At the end of the day, when I want something, and I feel like what they're asking is fair, I'll get it. If I don't want something, I won't. Or if I think what they're asking of me isn't fair, I'm not going to do it. All the talk doesn't matter, at the end of the day, that's what it is."

"The truth is, when you talk about Borderlands," Pitchford tells us, trailing off a bit. "Like, I don't know how I can say this and sound as if I have any amount of humility. [...] Borderlands 4 is amazing. It's absolutely an incredible game, and the value is undeniable.

"You look at all the past Borderland games, we have people that spend thousands of hours in The Borderlands. If you think about that in terms of the most amount that could have ever been spent versus the time of entertainment, you can't find a better value in the world for any kind of entertainment."

Randy Pitchford and his "big personality" may have caused Gearbox some controversy with all that $80 Borderlands 4 banter, but his boss wouldn't have it any other way: "I still love him to death."