With the official announcement of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel today for last-gen consoles, Gearbox President Randy Pitchford explained to Eurogamer why it’s not coming to the PS4 and Xbox One as well by saying, “It’s not free to build a game for next-gen. So when we decide where to spend our resources, we want to spend all of the attention we can on the game itself.”
Pitchford continued:
If you try to image the set of Borderlands players who have already upgraded, that’s not 100 per cent. But if you try to image the set of Xbox One or PS4 owners who do not have an Xbox 360 or a PS3, the difference there is so close to nil you can’t make a business rationalization around that.
Along with Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel being announced, Gearbox also confirmed that Borderlands 2 had become the best-selling title in 2K’s history. So, this pretty much guarantees we’ll see Borderlands 3 at some point, but Pitchford revealed how Gearbox is set on making different games right now:
We’re making other games, too. I don’t think I would have to stretch far to suggest there’s probably a lot of demand for more Borderlands. That demand lives on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. We don’t know to what extent it’ll live on the next-gen. I imagine over time – maybe by the time we get to the third or fourth Christmas – there will be enough of an install base.
Currently there is – between PS3 and Xbox 360 – over 150m installed units worldwide – probably 170m is more realistic. There are fewer Xbox Ones and PS4s than we sold copies of Borderlands 2. But because Borderlands 2 did so well there’s obvious demand there, and we have not been able to serve it sufficiently with just DLCs. And we’ve consumed all the memory there is to consume to add more content to Borderlands 2.
And frankly, as creators, we love the space. We’re still arguing inside of Gearbox about how much of our own time we should spend in the Borderlands space versus on future things, because a lot of us really love making Borderlands.
Only teasing their new IP, Pitchford said, “Although we haven’t announced anything, I haven’t been quiet that we’re building new IP at Gearbox. We’ll announce something in the future about that.”
Judging by Pitchford’s above comments, do you think we’ll see Borderlands 3 at Christmas 2015 or Christmas 2016, when the PS4/Xbox One install base is built up? Let us know in the comments below.
