Borderlands 4 launching early has “literally 0%” to do with GTA 6’s release date, Marathon or anything save “confidence”, says Gearbox boss
Gearbox and Take-Two recently brought forward the release of giggling gunslinger Borderlands 4 from 23rd September to 12th September. This came a week or two after Bungie and Sony also decided to release their Marathon reboot on 23rd September.
If you thought all that was evidence of publishers playing 4D chess around the currently unannounced release date of GTA 6, with Bungie and Sony making the fair assumption that Take-Two won’t release GTA 6 and Borderlands 4 on the same day… then you were mistaken. You should be ashamed to speculate in this fashion! Pshaw! Harrumph! Damn your eyes, sir, and damn the stalking horse you rode in on.
So says Gearbox chieftain Randy Pitchford, who has climbed the parapets of social media to insist that the new Borderlands is only shipping early because it’s super, duper good, and not because Gearbox are trying to avoid either an elevator fight with Marathon or the undivulged impact site of the incoming GTA 6 meteor, which will surely obliterate the sales of any game foolish enough to ship in close proximity.
“Borderlands 4 shipping early is 100% the result of confidence in the game and development trajectory backed by actual tasks and bug find/fix rates,” wrote Pitchford. “Our decision is literally 0% about any other product’s actual or theoretical launch date.”
As is the lot of many chieftains standing on parapets, Pitchford is getting a lot of heat for these assertions that Borderlands 4 is simply too darn brilliant to consign to the wastelands of late September. The Xitter replies are damning: three Dr Evil fingerquote gifs and counting, also a Pinocchio, an Anchorman, and several side-eyeing dogs. Now to see if Marathon, too, undergoes a sudden excess of confidence and brings its release date forward a few weeks. The Great Game continues.
According to what we know for sure, GTA 6 will release in fall 2025. “There is slippage in the industry and we’re not immune from that,” Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick commented in November. “However, we narrowed the timing because we are highly confident in that timing.”
