Borderlands 4 CEO: "Code your own engine and show us how it's done please" — as performance woes hit the game's Steam review score.

Borderlands 4 is here, and it's pretty great! That is, unless you're looking for great performance.

I'm always slightly suspicious when games restrict reviews to a single platform, and it emerged a little telling when Borderlands 4's review program was only offering PC code. The game runs decently enough on Xbox Series X, but its claustrophobic field of view and awful stutter-prone quality mode leave a lot to be desired. But the problems run deeper on PC.

Crashes and middling performance, even on 1-2 year old hardware, despite its "cartoony" appearance, haven't ingratiated the game with its core audience. PC gamers have rewarded Borderlands 4 with a "mixed" review score as a result, but Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford seems to think the criticisms aren't warranted.

In a barrage of posts on X, Randy Pitchford responded to one user saying "code your own engine and show us how it's done please," while claiming less than 0.01% of Borderlands 4 users are reporting "legitimate" performance issues.

"Code your own engine and show us how it’s done, please," Pitchford said in response to a user criticising the game's AI upscaling recommendation. "We will be your customer when you pull it off. The people doing it now are clearly dumb and don’t know what they’re doing and all the support and recommendations and code and architecture from the world’s greatest hardware companies and tech companies working with the world’s greatest real time graphics engine coders don’t know what you seem to know. /sarcasm"

Pitchford has become notorious for his X / Twitter use over the years, exacerbating criticisms rather than quelling them. He shared a range of recommendations on the platform, asking users to lower various features such as volumetric fog in order to boost performance. Other users pointed out that some of the recommendations contradict Borderlands 4's previously shared official guidelines for performance, however.

"We had come CS work prove that through settings tweaks only being able to climb up to 120fps + on PC in BL4 with three and four year old hardware," Pitchford said. "Your mileage may vary, but please consider using the tools available to you to tune your own balance between FPS, resolution and graphics features."

Pitchford rounded off many of the threads, thanking users for their passion and feedback, noting that players' voices were heard. Although in the same breath, he said that adding a FOV slider to consoles would impact "fairness," despite the fact that the PC version has a FOV slider and also supports cross-play.

It's hard to say what Gearbox's priorities will be regarding performance and technical improvements across both PC and console, but it's clear that performance in general has become a hot topic in gaming as of late.

The plurality of hardware configurations out there is certainly a challenge for optimization

There's no doubt that the vast variety of PC configurations out there is exacerbating performance issues. Unreal Engine 5 has become something of a notorious signal for potential performance issues, fair or not, but Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney previously laid blame at developers for this — noting the tendency to build games for the high-end first, and optimize for the low-end second.

What is pretty much known not to help is attacking customers for their concerns. I'm sure the vast majority of Borderlands 4 players aren't even aware of the social media back-and-forths taking place on Pitchford's X account, but it's not exactly a good look for the game — particularly when it contradicts previous performance guidance.

Like many games, I'm sure Borderlands 4 will eventually climb up the optimization ladder over time. Starfield gained a 60 FPS mode post-launch on Xbox Series X as a recent top-of-mind example. However, more and more developers are following Tim Sweeney's advice and are optimizing for the low end first.

Developers who optimize for the Xbox Series S first instead of after the fact, repeatedly hail the system as helping optimization across the board. Black Myth Wukong has been a pretty notorious example of a game that ignored the Xbox Series S until after the fact, and thus, reportedly found it difficult to retroactively optimize for the system. The same can be true for lower-end PC graphics cards in essence, and particularly handhelds like the Steam Deck or upcoming Xbox Ally.

In a world where games are living and dying based on how many platforms they can access, it would probably behove developers to focus on fun, performance, and visuals in that order — but they might have telemetry that suggests otherwise. Previous conventional wisdom suggests that gamers want everything to look cutting edge, but the tide of opinion may be shifting as users rein in spending and try to get more use out of their existing hardware setups.

What probably isn't helping is Randy Pitchford's social media style, which is most likely simply serving to further frustrate users who feel the game isn't performing to spec.