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Evidently firm in his view that Borderlands 4 PC performance complaints have simply been overblown online, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford claims that only a tiny fraction of the game's player base have reported performance issues via Gearbox's customer service desk.
I'm just going to head this off now: I'd wager that only a small fraction of Borderlands 4 players have used Gearbox customer support at all. In fact, in a recent post, the CEO said "roughly 1%" of Borderlands 4 players, by installs, have filed a customer service report. One might think this presents reporting concerns for this data, but then, one might simply not tweet.
Of those, "more than half" were reports for Shift account issues, Pitchford says. The next most common issue was console FOV, and Pitchford says Gearbox is "working on it." Then comes Twitch issues, and finally, at "0.04% of customers," we have PC performance.
Pitchford says 0.009% of reports were flagged as "valid" issues by customer support, while 0.037% of reports "have experienced success with education (settings coaching)."
Pitchford has separately pushed for PC gamers to keep their expectations in check and maybe tone their settings down, and in another tweet, says "I have personally helped users go from 30FPS to 90FPS".
"That is less than one percent of one percent (0.01%) of customers using CS tickets for valid performance issues, which is less than 1/5 of the users using CS to get help with Twitch drops," he writes in his main post.
"This reality is dramatically different than what you would expect if your only sources of information were, say, certain internet threads."
In a separate reply, Pitchford said "we are also looking at telemetry in real time regardless of what people report. There are people with low perf and we care about that. But 1% of one million is ten thousand! Just one thousand posts feels like everyone the way internet chatter works."
There is genuinely something to be said for improving your performance by tinkering with a game's settings, updating your drivers, or some other PC gaming rigamarole. But at this point I would point to Borderlands 4's 22,200 Steam reviews, 7,770 of which are negative, because a huge chunk of those negative reviews cite performance issues.
I would also point to the testing done by our friends at PC Gamer, who found that the game sees stutters and disappointing frame rates across a range of hardware.
In seven hours, I've personally had no major issues on a 9800X3D and a 5080 apart from a game-breaking bug that forced me to restart the game, but I did find that disabling volumetric fog made Borderlands 4 look and run better, and an apparent overreliance on DLSS is frustrating.
Borderlands 4 is not at all unplayable on PC, but it is showing worse performance than multiple modern and (at minimum) visually comparable games, which is where this hubbub has come from. I don't know if saying, per Pitchford, that "Everyone who has real issues is someone we care about - we want to help everyone because we want everyone to enjoy the game!" is going to satisfy all the folks reporting issues.
