Asmongold TV - “If you’re a real fan, you’ll find $80” | Asmongold TV

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

“If you’re a real fan, you’ll find $80” Asmongold show for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more. ------------------------- ------- Keywords: gaming podcast, pc gaming, twitch clips, gaming hot takes, gaming content creator, gaming news Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You guys heard about $70 video games, right? We all heard about $70 video games. Well, we're already thinking about $80 video games now. And Borderlands 4 might indeed be $80. Fuck that. Well, what they say is fuck you. That's it. I'm going to get one of those signs that sits behind me that says,

zero days since last industry controversy. I have never seen so many companies so ready, so willing, such in a rush to try to give players more reasons, to buy their games. I sit back and I read some of this stuff and I'm just like, why can't you guys be normal? Just for like a week. Now we have CEO Randy Pitchford coming forward to say that real fans will be able to find

a way to buy their games for $80. Rushing off. Only the real fans are going to be able to spend $80 on our looter shooter slop game with millennial humor and mediocre graphics and below average gameplay. But it's only for the real. about price increases and then also turning it into a fandom purity test. That is a bold

strategy cotton. Let's see how that pays off for you. Too many times these publishers and studios are betting on blind consumerism. Yeah. And time and time again, they are proven wrong. It's basically like the AAA game industry

their business model is that people are retarded. And they hope that if people are dumb enough, that maybe they can make money off of them. That's what it's all about. Realize how far their actions and their words travel. Every cash out and every crash out,

it's costing them. It's costing them dearly. So today what I want to do is I want to give a lesson on brand economics. As a fan, Randy, we're going to talk about how your brand influences your financial performance and ultimately your future. Because Borderlands is not the kind of game that I would just assume

everybody's going to buy. Regardless of how much money they have or how big of a fan they are, or better yet, used to be. With both Nintendo and Xbox, increasing their prices up to $80, it's expected that other publishers

will fall online soon. And most players are already wondering which games are going to be the next ones to make the jump. A few developers... Here's the problem is that a lot of these games, like they're just not worth $70 or $80. That's the big issue.

is that Randy's right, but Randy's not making Eldon Ring. You're not making Baldersgate 3. You're making another looter shooter. That's very different. And in on the topic. And in a surprising twist, EA CEO Andrew Wilson had already stated that they have no plans to raise their prices at this time, regardless of what the company. Well, yeah, because you have a million fucking microtransactions and you're farming five-year-olds

with FIFA gambling. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you don't need to raise the price. price. What a surprise. That statement alone tells you how volatile this topic has become. Players are becoming more price sensitive by the day. Not just because of inflation,

but because the price of games already win up less than five years ago, from $60 to $80. Two points on a graph is a coincidence, but three is a trend. At this rate, people aren't worried about this price hike. They're more worried about the next one. Yeah, exactly. That's why when a fan reply...

Yeah, it's like if you're... If games are going up this fast in price, who's to say in five years games won't be $120. I'd like to Randy Pitchford on Twitter with a friendly warning. It resonated. He said, Randy, this game better not be $80. Don't take that risk. A lot of gamers aren't going to pay $80 and feed this notion of constant price increases.

You're the CEO. You have some say when it comes to your publisher. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't aggressive. Just a reasonable concern from someone looking forward to Borderlands for and worried about the fact that it might cost too much. In response, Randy Pitchford delivered what might be the single worst way to answer a paying customer. A, it's...

No, it's not. It's not even remotely close to the worst way. There's like way more stupid ways of doing this. Yeah, we've seen way worse, okay, guys. It's not my fault. And B, if you're a real fan, you'll find a way to make it happen. My local game store had Star Flight for Sega Genesis for $80 in 19, 91 when I was just out of high school working minimum wage in an ice cream parlor in Pismow Beach,

and I found a way to make it happen. Right, because nothing says love for a franchise like quietly accepting predatory pricing and bending over at the cash register. Well, it's also because back then there weren't a bunch of other games that really high quality. That's the other thing, is that whenever you have, whenever you're existing in a market that's really competitive, you have to do something in order to make yourself stand out. So there's two ways that you can make your stealth stand out with video games.

You either make a really good game or you make your game really cheap. You have vampire survivors or you have Elven Ring. Imagine thinking that fandom is only defined by how much financial discomfort you're willing to endure. This isn't just tone deaf. This is loyalty tax disguised as nostalgia. So let's break this down. A multi-millionaire CEO in 2025 during an era of a housing crisis, inflation and mass layoffs is telling players that if they really cared. They would just behave like he did in 1991 when a game still had a...

You just got to go. You got to understand that, brother, you go into the store and you ask to speak with a manager and you got to give him a firm handshake and give him your resume in person. That's how... So back in 1974, I got my first job doing that. And that's all you need to do, all right? Yep. Physical resale value didn't have season passes, deluxe editions,

micro-transactions, or day one DLC. This isn't PR. This is financial cosplay. He's not relating to players. He is romanticizing economic struggle just to justify an $80 video game. That game that he bought in 1991,

it didn't come with a deluxe edition four expansion passes in a six-month roadmap. You bought it, you played it, you were done with it. So that's not so different from what Borderlands Four is going to be today.

Here's another component. College, housing, food, and other expenses back then were not rapidly increasing beyond the rate of inflation even at a same, at the same time that the amount of money you're making isn't going up at all. So the issue isn't that. So like here's a, like, let's say this is, let me go back. This is your money. okay so this is all of your money well what's happened is that people have been eating into this money and these circles that used to be this big are now this big and so you have for example uh food um school uh let me move this over uh school and then you have uh let's see a cell phone

And then let's go ahead and let's do another really big one, right? And let's see. This is obviously, you know, rent, mortgage. Yeah. Mortgage is that. Yeah, yeah, this is a T. Okay. That's what I thought. Yeah. And so like now, like the amount of money that people have has become like much more minimal. So the issue is that back then you had proportionally more disposable income. because you didn't have all of these extra expenses. And the price, like, for example, like, look at the price of tuition for college. And the price of tuition for college, this is the issue that a lot of people, like, I think Randy doesn't really understand this because it's like a third order effect. And he's not part of this generation. But this is what happens to a lot of people that go to college, is that they take out a tremendous amount of money in student loans.

And the majority of people that play borderlands for are. millennials. These are going to be people within the ages of probably like, I don't know, like, it's like 28 to like 40, right? And maybe 20 to 40. Let's say like this age group. These people are, they basically had to make a Faustian pact with the government and say that no matter what, I'm going to pay this ever increasing amount of money back in order to attain this degree that's going to get me a rapidly decreasing in value job. And so this is what happens to these people. They're going to, getting spawn camped. Yes, they are. And they've been groomed into this, right? They've been groomed into this by adults for their whole life. You can't blame a kid at 18 years old after they've spent 12 years in school being told if you don't go to college, you're going to be a loser. You can't blame a kid for taking that risk when they've been groomed into that decision ever since they could exist and even think for themselves. And so the big problem is that a lot of these new costs, Randy might not really be aware of.

Like I had a friend of mine, like, for example, this is just a personal story. I'm sure. Tell me if you guys, this story either resonates with you or with a friend that you know. I had a friend that got a degree from UT, and he got a degree in theoretical physics. Well, it turns out that got him a theoretical job. So he had to go and get a real degree in mechanical engineering. And so after he got that real degree in mechanical engineering, he had over $100,000 in student loan debt.

And like obviously like you know he now I mean he I think he's paid all paid all that back right. And like keep in mind like he was like a top 5% top 1% person whenever we went to school. You know like he was in like on a role. He was like kind of almost 4.0 GPA. Very very smart. He's smart in some things. You know like he was good at doing assignments in school. Okay. And he's a smart guy to be fair. And anyway, he's a nerd.

it's my boy, right? I mean, we play Magic with Gathering together. And every day. Now, I, we grew up together. And so, like, he made the money back. And, like, so, like, he's, you know, he's fine. But he's the minority, right? He is a hyper minority of people that was able to secure a six-figure engineering job that now.

And also, he works his fucking ass off. Like, he had to, he has to wake up at, like, five in the morning or something like that. Like, it's like, like, five or six in a morning. And he doesn't get home until, like, like, six or, seven. It's insane. And so this guy works his fucking ass off. And like, yeah, he can make the money back. But think about how many people can do that. How many people do that? And they don't even have the money to pay off those student loans.

So what Randy doesn't understand, sorry, I'm going off on a big tangent here, is that nowadays, you have so many people that are eating into your money cookie that there's only crumbs left. And so you can't use 1991 logic anymore because we're not in 1991. And I understand inflation causes the price of video games to go up, and I get that. But to say that in a vacuum is tone deaf. I think the fact is that whenever we're really old, we are going to lament the times that video games were only $100. I'm being serious. One day that will happen, but it's happening too fast right now. And that's exactly why this pricing conversation deserves a little bit more care. So no, Randy, your story about saving up while working at an ice cream parlor

doesn't justify $80 digital video games. It makes you sound like the kind of guy who thinks eating ramen to afford loot boxes builds character. Pitchford is right about something. Oh, God. Gotcha. And the fans will find a way, just not the way that he's going to want them to. They'll wait for a sale, or they will skip it entirely. Some of them are just going to pirate it out of spite. And they're going to do that guilt-free because unlike Randy, they're not going to be a sign. moral weight to a price tag. The best part of this is that other studios picked up on this sentiment. Devolver Digital fired off a surgical strike.

I wish that Devolver made games that I liked more because I love Devolver. I love their events. I think that like their vibe. Like they're one of my favorite publishers. And I just wish they made more games that like that I would be like, oh my God, I really can't wait to play this. Twitter saying that you're going to be able to buy Myco Punk for you and three of your friends for the price of one copy of.

borderlands 4. Mycopunk, by the way, is this slick-looking F-E-S-P-P-V-E hoard shooter that has a demo that's out right now. Am I crazy for thinking that like this and borderlands are basically like, like I don't, like this just, this looks fine. Like borderlands looks fine. Like it's the same thing. Like, yeah. This is the problem that I think these people don't realize. Like with Unreal Engine and the other types of advances in technology, these AAA studios, are not creating anything special by having good graphics anymore. And by the way, you can probably play that with friends for like 100 hours, completely free. Hitchford not wanting to take the L, retweeted Devolver Digital's post with this bizarre response,

Mycopunk is cheaper than one point of meth, probably has fewer side effects too. What does that even mean? And now this whole thing is just going to be remembered is 2025. Well, what does that mean? That means that back in 1991, that wasn't all Randy was spending his money on. Yeah, I say that. It wasn't just those Sega games, bro. He spent his money on all kinds of shit.

Don't you guys have phones moment? Or maybe EA's, it's not gambling. It's surprise mechanics. Another one of those tone-deaf executives that are trying to make a point only to remind players where they stop trusting these people in the first place. Funny enough before this happened,

Hitchford actually addressed the pricing concerns at a recent Borderlands event. He had said that... I feel bad for Randy in a way because Randy is right that he is in a place where his hands are tied because publishers generally decide the prices of video games. So he's put in a position

where he effectively has to tank the decisions of another person. But I also am not sure like how much of this he's really pushing back on privately at all because obviously like, you know, if I was publishing a game, theoretically, imagine if I published a video game, you know, and the developer wanted to price it

at a lower price point, I would probably try to work with the developer and do something that they want. Especially if I'm trying to make a business relationship with this person that's going to last for 20 or 30 years. No, if Borderlands 4 was going to follow Nintendo where Xbox is pricing, reiterated that it wasn't his call

and then added on that this game's budget is more than double that of Borderlands 3. But he finished by saying that he believes in this game that it's great and that it will deliver at any price point. And honestly, it might, but that's not the issue anymore. The sad part... No, it won't. It's too much.

It's just too much. $80 for a game is too much for something like this in a market that's too over-saturated. Sorry. I mean, if you want the truth, I mean, look at the first descendant. I mean, the first descendant, I think, in a lot of ways, has cleaner and better gameplay than it looks like Borderlands does. I'll be honest. I think it does.

So, like, why would I not just play that? lost a lot in the movie. This didn't have to be a controversy. Pishford just said what he had said at the event or better yet said nothing at all. The conversation would have moved on. Maybe people would have grumbled about the potential price hike. Maybe they would wait for a sale, but that would have been the end of it. Instead, he gave players another reason not to buy his game,

one that has nothing to do with the price tag and everything to do with the person behind it. And that's real... And I think also there's a big component to it where like a lot of consumers don't want to spend money on expensive games. because they're worried that by doing so, they will create an ecosystem where those games are allowed to grow and get more popular and make money. It's like you don't want to reward a behavior

that you don't want to continue. It's not just about the $80 price tag. It's about the arrogance, the entitlement, and the complete lack of understanding about how players actually think. Pitchford turned what could have been a calm consumer level concern

into a loyalty test. He didn't just defend the price. He turned it into a challenge, a line in the sand. And this behavior isn't rare anymore. It's becoming a... It's patronizing, and I think that it's especially patronizing to young people. Whenever they see people that are older who grew up in an economy that they felt like that at least young people from their perspective, that economy was like more rewarding and, you know, people had more of a chance in it.

And then to have somebody from that culture come and like talk down to them about selling a product to them, that's going to immediately trigger the fuck out of people. They're going to be mad as fuck about that. And it makes sense. The door is shut behind them. And I think they're right. I do. I think all these like teenagers and college students and stuff like that that want communism, I think that they're wrong that that's the solution, but they're right that there's a problem.

There's a huge problem. We've seen this time and time again, developers and executives who either don't understand the weight that their words can carry or worse, they think that they're untouchable because of their titles. They treat their personal social media accounts like it's a diary forgetting that everything they say reflects back on the studio, their co-workers, and the game that they are trying to sell. And when those comments backfire, the damage doesn't just hit them alone. It hits everybody around them. Yeah. Just look at L-Divers, too, that game had it. This is another really big component is that when a person at a studio says something, like another great example of this was Matt Hanson from the avowed studio Obsidian,

is that when he started making all these statements about how Elon Musk was bad and he was putting in pronouns in the game and like all this other weird like alienating political language. That kind of stuff hurt the entire studio and it damaged the whole game. And so when you can't keep your mouth shut and then you negatively affect a product in a massive way, you're not just hurting yourself. You're hurting everybody around you. If I was CEO, I would have fired him. No, the reason why they didn't fire him is because the CEO and the people at the company

probably agree with them. That's the reason why. And I think that's one of the reasons why people lose trust in these development studios. Because you're right. I mean, if he had said the same thing about black people that he said about white people, everybody knows that he'd be out of a job in a day. But the reason why he didn't is because of this double standard. And I think that people resent that double standard. They see it. It's obvious. You can't tell people it's not real. And because of that, you have people that just massively lose trust. Close have launched, even with matchmaking issues, bugs and crashes. Players still stuck around because the developers felt like they were connected, passionate, and engaged. But once the first ballots patch hit, well, the Reddit Post started rolling in, and then one of their developers openly admitted to antagonizing the fans for their own entertainment.

Discord mods started banning people using clown emojis on furry art. Then came the now famous, I thought you were refunding the game and leaving post from one of their community managers during the Sony account linking disaster. it does not matter how good the game was. The real problem there, in my opinion, was the Discord moderators. And I actually don't mind when a developer is snarky or rude to an obnoxious fan. It's like that Marco Pierre White thing, where it's like some guy is snapping their fingers telling me what to do, like acting weird, coming in late for dinner. You said you'd be here at 9. It's 9.40 and you just got here. What the fuck is this?

Like, nah, get the fuck out. And so like I very much dislike the idea that, you know, companies should be punching bags. I really dislike that idea. But at the same time, it was the Discord mods that they had a bunch of furries and weirdos that wanted to put weird shit in Discord and use, and this is for Helldivers. It's for a fucking video game. It was so weird. The trust was gone.

And they didn't even get rid of it. And they didn't even get rid of it. Yeah. Rebuilding Goodwill and delivering real updates for them to be able to recover that audience. that they once had by default. Or go look at Starfield. That game's reception was already shaky, but whatever sympathy Bethesda had left had evaporated

by the time that their narrative lead, Emile Pagularulo, logged on to scold players on Twitter saying that they don't understand how hard it is to make games. Instead of just listening to players about what they actually wanted, freedom, personality, a reason to care. The funny thing is, Emil wasn't completely wrong, but it doesn't matter whether he was wrong or not. That's what these people don't understand.

is that you don't negotiate, you don't guilt-trip the customer. That doesn't work. He guilt-tripped them, as if emotional manipulation. Exactly. Exactly. That's what you don't do. Yeah, you don't want to do that.

Could patch out a lack of meaningful content. Guess what? It didn't work. Avowed, Concord, Starfield, Hell Divers, too. The list goes on. Different games, different studios, same exact problem. Developers.

Reading players like obstacles, personal politics and petty grudges. I really like the fact that he said that. Developers that treat players like obstacles. That's exactly the way that I feel. That's a great way to put it. Overriding professionalism in every single time the exact same result. Disappointment, backlash, silence, and loss of players. That's what makes it all so frustrating.

It's not about just one quote or one tweet or one tone-deaf reply. It's about a pattern. These companies are already asking players to pay, more than ever. And when the people that are representing those companies act dismissive, snide, or outright combative, it just gives players a very easy reason to just walk away. It's also, again, like, I really think that we need to talk about the class dynamics in this. You have an older man who enjoyed the privileges of the perceived better economy that is now a multi-millionaire that is patronizing younger people

trying to buy a product telling them that oh you'll find a way to make it work just like I did I think that really really rubs people the wrong way the same as if you're a broke boy just say so it's the exact same thing

and it's not and it's really class like obviously generations matter like that you know like it's an older person talking down and so it's like a perception of a for an economy, but people feel the same way about streamers. Like they do, of course, right?

And this is like, for example, like whenever, like, I don't really sell merch or anything like that, but I remember like, OTP got negative feedback with like, you know, certain things that we've sold. Like they said, oh, this is too much money. And it's like, like Star, Star Forge is a great example. When I was involved with StarForge on day one, whenever we announced, day one was the worst day of that company. no, that's not true.

The worst day of the company was probably the day that Trump announced the tariffs. The second worst day of the company was probably the first day. And so, yeah, that was second day. Because a lot of people were very, very negative about it, right? And they hated it because we had an I-3 processor. And like, we sat down. And I remember it was an all hands on deck. Like Charlie was there, Schlat was there, Tips was there.

like all the guys from StarForge was there, I was there, S fan Nick was there, everybody was there, right? And we decided that day, we made the decision, the customer is always right. And it doesn't matter what we think the value proposition is. If we're selling this product and the consumer doesn't think the product is valuable and they don't think that it's good, then that is the bottom line. one of the best decisions we made. And that's it. And it's the same as we made decisions with like in the EU. Like we charge higher prices in the EU because we thought it would be better for consumers to give them the upfront costs rather than have it be a surprise when they pay for it at customs.

It's again. And the reason why it's about respect. It's about respect and it's about being able to understand your consumer and treat them like your trying to help them. That's the goal, right? You're trying to create, like, because again, you take a step back fundamentally, 95% of business, if not 100%, is about solving someone's problem. My problem is that my hair is too long. Okay, well, I need to go to a barber. My problem is that I'm bored. Okay, well, I'm going to go to a movie. My problem is that I'm hungry. I'm going to go to the grocery store. My problem is that I, you know, want to exercise. I'm going to go

to academy and buy a set of weights. So whenever you look at it from a perspective of like solving a problem, you understand that as a business, your business is to serve. It's not to order people around. It's not to tell them what to do. It's not to patronize them. It's to serve them. And if you can understand that concept, you can have, you can do business in a way that's

not toxic. And that's what so many of these developers just don't seem to understand. and so many businesses don't seem to understand either in general. The average player doesn't care about who's managing the discord or balancing the damage numbers, but they do care and they do notice when somebody from that team acts like the audience is beneath them. When you push players away, don't be surprised when they don't come back. Games are already expensive. Don't make players pay for your ego too. I genuinely think that these companies underestimate how many people use social media,

which makes a lot of sense seeing how much they spend on their marketing budget. but it doesn't take a whole lot to come across a stray quote or a headline. You don't have to be watching videos like this. If you are remotely interested in borderland. The entire idea that everybody now like, and also like think about what is, like think about the level of disrespect that these companies are exhibiting by even using this as an argument. It's okay for us to sell a bad product that's discussed online in depth about it being negative and problematic. because we have an army of retards

that are going to see a commercial for it on TV and buy it anyway. What a shitty business model? Like really? I mean, what a cynical, shitty business model that is? There's a good chance that you're going to be scrolling Twitter or Reddit or YouTube or whatever it might be and you're going to see something

and all of a sudden somebody that had passing interest in something is going to pass entirely. Yeah, exactly. It's as easy as that. Once negative sentiment, it starts, it is impossible to put out. It spreads fast. It is possible to put it out, but it's really hard. It took StarForge, probably six months to rebuild that trust, if not longer. Think about how long it took for CD Project Red, how long it took for No Man Sky. You can rebuild the trust, and oftentimes

the trust being rebuilt makes it stronger than it was in the beginning. But at the same time, Like, from software hasn't really ever needed to rebuild trust. And I think that people trust them and I think they're great. Same as Valve. So, like, you don't need to do that. Rebuilding requires making a good product. Yeah, and it costs a lot of money. It's better to maintain trust.

It's cheaper. It's cheaper to maintain trust than to rebuild it. Past, hardcore fans, people making YouTube videos for Borderlands content, people that stream it and things like that. they might be able to brush it off, but the wider audience, no. The people that have been burned before, the people that are sitting on the fence, the people are wondering whether or not they're even going to be able to afford it. When something like this hits their feed, it just reinforces all of their most negative

and worse assumptions possible. These developers are out of touch. Every single, every negative possible thing you can imagine is true. The pricing is unjustified. And now here I am sitting here and seeing the CEO say that if I want to play their game, I need to dig deep to be able to be taken seriously. Yeah, Jesus. $80.

$80. Just living on earth when it comes to some of these executives. They cannot see anything past their own ego. You're sitting here telling me during a housing crisis, all this inflation, all these prices going up, you're trying to tell the common customer that we increased our prices, we increased our staff by 150 members, we increased our budget by more than twice the amount. And you got to pay for it. We're going to need you guys to be able to make that up.

Yep. You overspent, you overstaffed. This is your problem. You make a bad financial decision and then you expect the customer to bail you out. That's not how it works. But you want us to make that math work. No. Personally, I don't understand where all this optimism is coming from.

Pitchford is acting like Borderlands is untouchable, but the way things have gone lately, you can only be certain that your real fans will be able to show up if you even have them. I am for all intents and purposes, a diehard Borderlands fan. I want Borderlands 4 to be amazing because if it's good,

I'll probably pour hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours into it. As somebody who grew up on Diablo and loves first person shooters, this series has always felt like it was tailor-made for me. I love the build crafting, the endless loot, the tight gunplay,

the class variety, and it's one of the best co-op experiences in all of gaming. When Borderlands is at its best, it plays like a co-op MMO with bite-sized story telling. And it has some of the most creative combat loops that are out there. Sirens with their space magic, pet and turret classes, other characters serving as weapons platforms, guns that shoot guns, launch bees and scream at you, legendary drops that completely changed your play style. True Vault Hunter mode, raid bosses, DLC that actually matters. And it's one of the last remaining franchises that hasn't thought. thrown itself head first into live service hell. No battle passes, no seasonal resets, no login bonuses.

I mean, you're not going to do that at all with Borderlands 4? I mean, I'll believe that when I see it. Yeah, I don't know about that. Just a complete experience packed with content straight out of the gate with expansions that actually expand on something. In a lot of ways, Borderlands is a reminder of what games used to be before monetization warped the entire genre. But that's the thing. What Borderlands represents and what Borderlands has become are two completely different things. And what I don't think Gearbox has acknowledged

or maybe hasn't realized is that Borderlands has a reputation for the few, not the many. On paper, this franchise is still giant. 93 million copies sold a long list of mainline titles and spinoffs, massive brand recognition, but you zoom in and it starts to tell a different story. Borderlands 2 alone counts for 30 million of those sales.

And just because a franchise has legacy doesn't mean that that audience is going to show up again. Look at Dragon Age the Vailgard. That's a franchise that had critical acclaim, massive fan investment. That's actually a really good example, because Dragon Age origins, I think, didn't it win game of the year whenever it came out? And like, did that help it whenever Dragon Age the Vailgard came out?

No, it was garbage. People hated it. On sales, but over the years, BioWare chipped away at the formula, changing the gameplay, shifting the tone, making thematic changes that didn't really sit all that well with players. By the time Vailgard rolled out, that reputation had already worn thin. The trailers didn't land.

The tone felt off. And when it released, the audience didn't show up for it. It missed its sales targets. It didn't make its money back. And it didn't matter how loved origins was. It only mattered how good Vailgard looked right now. Yeah, you're not going to be able to guilt people into buying a game because they liked the game 12 years ago. I mean, especially not with all the bad press around it, too.

It's not like it was only one bad thing about the game. There were like 10 bad things about it. Nothing about it was good. The combat looked like garbage. The graphics were garbage. The story looked weird. They had like weird woke stuff in it too that was aliening for people. Like, everybody thought it was bad.

Borderlands is not immune to that. Legacy can only get you so far when each new entry leaves a worse impression than the last. The pre-sequel was the first sign of this. It reused assets linked heavily on recycled systems and told a side story that nobody asked for. It is still the worst-selling game in the series. Then came Borderlands 3, a mechanical leap. forward that modernized the gameplay. It's only 22 million copies, but it dropped the ball entirely when it came to

writing and tone. I have a love-hate relationship with Borderlands 3. I love playing it, but I hate the fact that I'm playing that game specifically. The gameplay loop is incredible, but every time a character opens their mouth, I want to mute the game. They followed up one of gaming's most iconic villains, handsome Jack, with two live streaming space influencers narrating your every move. They leaned hard into this ugh influencers thing and even harder into the worst kind of

of millennial irony. Surface level references, smug quips and jokes less funny than watching the view. And probably the most damning part of the game. That's one of the big issues too is that the writing is being done by millennials. Like millennials have done irreparable damage to writing and it cannot be overstated. Do you think the increasing price is anything to do with recouping money from the movie flop? No, because every studio is doing it. They killed off the love legacy characters and shoved new ones in your face like you were supposed to care. Especially Ava, one of the most grating, self-important characters I've ever seen shoehorned into a major franchise.

The whole thing had this weird forced female empowerment thing that was going on, but it was all corporate branding on top of these. This is the problem is that like everybody can tell when they're trying to push some like weird women agenda or something like that. Like a lot of guys and like I think average people can tell. I think maybe they think they're being subtle. about this, but if you're not even good at, like, if you can't even write good jokes, what do you think the chances are that you can write a good agenda? Well, you can't. And so people see what's

going on and they realize they're playing a product that is fundamentally inauthentic. And that's why they stop, they stop having interest in it. It's a huge factor. It just didn't land. It didn't work. It was bad. And the damage didn't end there. The backlash from Borderlands 3 carried directly into Tiny Tina's Wonderland, a game that should have been a slam dunk, expanding on the franchise's most beloved DLCs and turning it into a full game should have meant something, but the reception was room temperature, safe, forgettable. By the time it launched in 2022, a lot of the longtime fans had already tapped out. The writing hadn't matured, the humor hadn't evolved, and critically, the end game was just

non-existent. DLC never fixed that issue, and for a series known for replayability, Wonderlands gave players very little reason to come back. So post the peak of Borderlands 2, you've already expended much of this franchise's reputation and it burned out longtime fans. But I don't even think winning back old fans is going to be Borderlands 4's biggest problem. The issue that they're going to be running into is the damage that's been done to the brand because Borderlands isn't just competing. This is one of the big issues that a lot of people don't understand with branding is that whenever a company's brand is damaged,

it's something that happens over time. It doesn't happen like immediately. It's not like, oh, instantaneously the brand is awful and everybody hates this game. No, or this product. no, it happens, like, there's, there has, the first product that comes out that's bad, a lot of people can usually forgive that. But then whenever it's the second one and the third one, that's whenever people really start to lose interest, it's gradual, yeah, that's what I think happened with bungee. It's what happened with Blizzard. And it's what's happened with a lot of studios.

And I think if Elder Scroll 6 is bad, it's going to happen to Bethesda as well. With other games, it's competing with its own reputation. The Borderlands movie bonds. catastrophically, pulling in just $18 million on $110 million budget. Miscast, tone depth, utterly disconnected from what made this series special. And for a lot of people, that's their first exposure that they've had to this franchise in years. Not the games, the flop. Then there's Take 2's recent update to their end user license agreement,

a move so anti-consumer that it sparked a review bombing campaign across all of their franchises. Bodding, banable, VPN use, banable, exploits in a single-player game, banable, Why would anybody give a fuck about exploiting in a single player game? How does that benefit the customer in any way to ban people for exploiting in a single player game? Why? Who cares? You bought the game. They've got your money.

Like Eldon Ring has a mod that turns you into a jet engine and you can blow everything up as a, not a jet engine, sorry, a fighter jet. and you can go around and blow everything up instantly, and somehow that's totally fine. So what happened? Data harvesting. Front and center. Meanwhile, their competition hasn't just caught up. It's already past them.

Deep Rock Galactic, Remnant 2, Hell Divers 2, Risk of Brain 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, Rust, Lethal Company. The co-op space is stacked right now. Some of these games are cheaper, some of them are free, and most of them feel fresher and more ambitious than what Borderlands has been offering lately. All of this leading up to the real question,

who is this game even for? anymore because it's for fat millennials that own at least five funco pops that still watch Marvel movies people that grew up that's what it's for they've grown up everybody knows it 20s 30s or 40s now they have kids careers limited time and they're not

lining up to drop $80 on a franchise they used to love just because it says And this is another he actually brings up a really good point here this is something I don't really talk about enough is that when you're a guy and you have like let's say like let's even if you have a lot of money buying a video game that you're going to play for a thousand hours because you play video games all day has a higher value add for you than buying a video game that you can play for three hours on Saturday and maybe a half hour or an hour a couple of times on a week.

And so that's another big issue is that as people, you know, get older and their priorities change, what happens is that now that value is no longer fully realized. It's back. They want value. They want trust. And they're not seeing either. And Gen Z players, they didn't grow up on Borderlands too. They came up through Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, games that speak an entirely different language. Their first impressions likely came from Borderlands 3, Wonderlands, or the dumpster fire of the movie.

Yeah, exactly. None of that reflects Borderlands at its peak, and none of it really sells the fantasy. And that's what makes this all so risky because legacy players aren't impressed. And also, I feel like the graphics haven't really improved. Like, I think that there's a way to do this graphical style that's, way cleaner and better than what they're doing. And how they're handling this is very, very mediocre. It's literally the same, yeah.

It's like you should like, like, for example, like Dark Souls 1 and Eldon Ring are the same style, but they just keep getting better. Where it's like when I look at Borderlands 4 and I compare it to what Borderlands 2 looked like, it's basically the same thing. This is never cared in the first place. Then who's going to be left to rally around this game? six years have passed since borderlands three that's long enough for a generation of players

to move on and forget or form new habits and the longer that you're gone without momentum or in the case of borderlands killing your own momentum the harder it is to clawback relevance you need every advantage that you can get you need a pitch that resonates beyond your core audience but instead pitchford's comments feels like he's betting on he has it he does have a pitch

that resonates beyond his core audience it's resonated with everybody and everybody's come together to say that he's a retard So it's resonated with the entire internet. It worked. And legacy, like Borderlands, is still a guaranteed seller, and it's not. And even if longtime fans do return telling them to find a way to pay $80 is a hell of a tone to strike. It does not build trust.

It builds resentment. It makes the franchise sound like it's still stuck in 2012, riding on the high of handsome jazz. Nothing is ever guaranteed. Back in nostalgia, but that world is gone. This is a different industry, a different audience, a different audience, different world and Borderlands doesn't get to act like it's the only game in town anymore. So yeah, while Pitchford might think that real fans are going to find a way, the reality is some of them won't, some of them didn't, some of them are going to see the price, they're going

to remember the quote, the jokes, the movie, and they're just going to walk away because even the most loyal players eventually stopped showing up when the brand they loved stopped speaking to them. That's what happened with wow, is that over time people just lost interest with the brand. And I think that's what happened with Overwatch as well. is that like if you mismanage a brand it doesn't die overnight but it dies over three or five years

and it is not a fiery you know like they don't burn out they fade away and it's sad Lance Van this hurts to say but everything past Borderlands 2 has not aged well not at all

in fact the writing the characters the themes that they use the jokes that they use it's cringe and cringe is not going to move copies No. And that's one of the reasons why the narrative lead for Borderlands 4 came forward and said, hey, this game's going to be much more darker, it's going to be much more grounded,

it's going to be a little bit more serious, and I hope that's the direction that they go. Because people's opinions are based off of their first impressions, and this series has not done a good job with first impressions for quite a few. Well, this is the reason why is that, like, I mean, if you can't even manage to make a good first impression, what are the odds you can make a good game? Really?

Judge a book by its cover? Absolutely. If you can't even manage to make a cover look good, bro, you do not have your shit together. Years. Come on. I want this game to be good. God.

Do I want this game to be good? You're going to play it when it comes out? Yeah, of course. ... does not have a lake to stand on when talking about betting on fan loyalty. Because you've burned that for the last decade. Real fans are going to find a way. Real fans are going to spend $80 on this bullshit. I don't think that they understand how.

far their words vary. Hitchford obviously has a lot of confidence in this game. And I think that's really important to have. You want to be confident about the game that you're making. You need to lead with that. Why wouldn't you just say, I don't control the price, but whatever that price is, I can promise you that we will deliver on it. That's all you would need to say.

He's actually right. That's a thousand times better to say it. Yeah, why didn't you just say that? most cases most people would just move on you know quarterlands does have value it has something that we just don't really see a whole lot anymore which is it is a self-contained price in most cases yeah i don't think the game's going to have any microtransactions it might have a season pass but that's all going to be for dLC it's basically we'll see about that captured in time and that's something we're celebrating how did you not

lead with that why would you not lead with that why aren't you using that in your marketing. Why aren't you parading that around on Twitter and on social media and saying, we don't have micro transactions? Remember with Borderlands, or no, Larian Studios had on Baldersgate 3's website that they don't have any. That says we believe in having a self-contained experience and no micro transactions and delivering on the price. I distinctly remember reading that on stream and being like, oh yeah, true dude based. Oh, wow, I can't wait to played this game. Never played it, by the way. Product or whatever it says. That went viral. An

FAQ in the bottom of the website went viral. Why aren't you doing that? Do these companies really not know how the internet works? I don't think they do. Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed the video. I think they enjoyed the video. Like the video. Share the video. Comment down below. Subscribe to the channel. Follow me on Twitch. Follow me on Twitter. And I'll catch you guys in the next one. Stay cool. Stay righteous. Stay safe. I actually think that's exactly what it is.

I think that they don't understand the internet. They don't understand these issues. And I think especially for guys that are older, like around Randy's age, they don't really understand a lot of the struggles that the average video game age player has. And so for them, these things seem normal, but they're actually extremely tone deaf, right? Like, that's really what I think is happening. There's a video right there. Give it a like.

I completely agree with this, by the way. $80 for a fucking video game like this? Again, I would have no problem paying $80 for an insanely good game, but we're not talking about an insanely good game. We're talking about this bullshit instead, right? And so I think that's a very big difference. Apparently, there's some big night rain event. Like, is this true?

Are they doing a night rain event? I have no idea. Viewers high to low? Night rain. Oh, it's just a tournament. Okay, never mind. I thought there was something that was happening and yeah

the drop nice on YouTube well no I'm not interested in watching streamers play the game I don't give a shit about that like I was curious if there was something that was actually happening that that mattered but no okay yeah who cares and so when I switch to yeah I'm going to play that

I'm going to play it tomorrow anyway I just wanted to double check but before before I move on I want to say that like in general this is exactly the way that I feel about this too is that the fact is that a lot of people nowadays just simply don't have

that much disposable income and on top of that there are so many other things that are eating into your income and on top of that you usually have because you've grown up with these games

you usually have way less things that you have like way less time that you have to spend playing the game so a value proposition $80 for 150 hours is way better than 80.

$80 for 50 hours. That's it. Yeah, child support. Yeah, clearly, right? I don't have enough disposable income. Yeah, and I think that people don't really understand how much, like, wages and things like this haven't increased. And that's been a huge problem.

So I think you had the NDAVision 33 video? Yeah, I know. That game is done very well. And at $50, too, I'll be right back. Give me a second. What's wrong enough fan base to carry them? Yeah, I think Borderlands 4 will probably make its money back, but the next one won't if it's bad.

I'll be right back.