Gearbox can pat themselves on the back as Borderlands 4 has emerged to be one of the most played and most popular games in the franchise. If it hasn’t already reached the top of the pack.
SteamDB logs that the game already reached a peak of 207,479 concurrent players within 24 hours of its launch. This is the highest concurrent player count any of the Borderlands games in the franchise has reached on Steam.
How Does It Compare To The Other Borderlands Games?
SteamDB has logs of the other games as well of course. We’ll skip the DLC and the Tales from the Borderlands and Tiny Tina spinoff games and share the concurrent player numbers for the main series below.
- Borderlands GOTY Edition – 23,655 players
- Borderlands GOTY Enhanced – 26,446 players
- Borderlands 2 – 124,678 players
- Borderlands The Pre-Sequel – 68,238 players
- Borderlands 3 – 93,820 players
A Small Note About The First Borderlands On PC And Steam
We do have to make a small explanation about the original Borderlands. The game originally released in 2009 as a big box physical release with Games For Windows Live.
The Steam listing for Borderlands GOTY indicates that it was released in 2012, AKA, 13 years ago. That’s because Gearbox went back in to change the original build they published on Steam.
They removed DRM like GFWL and improved performance to meet expectations. Borderlands GOTY Enhanced Edition released six years ago.
All of this is to say that the 20,000+ concurrent player number may have been culled from publicly available data. But it probably does not accurately indicate how many gamers really bought the original Borderlands for Windows all the way back in 2009, much less played it together.
Gearbox and Take-Two will have that very specific data in their records. Ultimately, this may all be apocryphal in any case.
So Is This Really A New Franchise Peak?
From what is publicly known, we can easily see that Borderlands 4 surpassed the concurrent player numbers of Borderlands 2. For many years, Borderlands 2 was the game considered the peak of the franchise.
It’s truly an achievement that Gearbox finally surpassed their achievements from that game all the way back in 2012. It seems to be confirmation that Gearbox did make the changes that fans were looking for to evolve the franchise, in ways that they hadn’t been able to in the past few entries.
It remains to be seen if Gearbox will be able to sustain this game’s popularity to make it a proper live service title. For now, there’s already enough to congratulate them for.
