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One month after hitting its player peak, Borderlands 4 has seen a massive drop in players.
Last September 14, around one month ago, they reached their player peak of 304,398 concurrent players on Steam. Today, that has dipped down to roughly 44,000 players.
This is a dip of as much as 85 % of its peak. But as argued by The Game Post, this is normal for any game with a live service component.
Will Borderlands 4 Be OK?
For most single player games, developers expect to make most of their money up front. Some games and franchises have the reputation to have the much sought after long tails.
But for the most part, game companies have gotten used to generating hype cycles to create huge launches for their titles.
When live service came along, a lot of fans and investors saw the huge rewards. But as we have now seen, it also comes with huge risks as well.
While there’s a bigger potential upside to a highly successful live service, failure could mean your company closing completely. Many mobile gaming companies themselves realized the pratfalls of trying to make this way of doing business sustainable.
Still, there’s enough successful live service games that it has continued to shift the direction of the industry. Gearbox is threading the needle on that front with Borderlands 4.
The game was full retail price at launch, and Gearbox has planned a year one roadmap with free and paid DLC.
Here’s What Gearbox Should Do Next
The Game Post argued that Gearbox’s biggest issue is the lack of content. This is not about the roadmap, which the studio has been delivering on schedule so far.
It really is more about the fans looking for a more substantial endgame. They expected more things to do after finishing the story campaign.
But it must also be said that Borderlands 4 also launched with quite a few performance issues, across all platforms. Some players are definitely waiting for the news that all those issues have been fixed.
Gearbox also still has opportunities outside of that. While the delay for the Switch 2 version is a disappointment, they could catch second wind when they finally launch on that platform.
To add to this, Randy Pitchford promised they would deliver cross-save / cross-progression. If Gearbox pulls this off, they could get tons of gamers double dipping with the Switch 2 to play the game on the go and then on a more powerful platform at home.
