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Gearbox has hit a new franchise peak with Borderlands 4.
Circana analyst Mat Piscatella shared this information as part of his September 2025 thread on the video game industry on Bluesky:
Borderlands 4 was the best-selling premium video game of September, debuting as the #3 best-selling game of 2025 year-to-date.
It was September’s best-seller on both the Xbox and aggregated PC storefront charts.
Content – Borderlands 4 generated the highest launch month dollar sales of any title in franchise history, nearly 30% higher than the previous best, Borderlands 3.
Borderlands 4 was the first Borderlands title to launch as the best-selling game of its release month.
EpicNNG reacted to this news after picking it up from IGN:
IGN reports that Borderlands 4 has generated more revenue so far than Borderlands 3 did in the same time frame.
I reached out to a source asking for any credibility on this claim, and I was told this is believed to be true.
Wild stuff, GGs to Gearbox
Borderlands 4 Is Good?
It seems strange to talk about Borderlands 4 as if it was already a huge flop. We ourselves reported on how the game already lost 85 % of its player base on Steam, one month after launch. The game is also visibly already going on sale.
And there is no lack of criticism of the game itself so we won’t even share that here. But it seems there’s something going on here that warrants further investigation.
Why Did We Think Borderlands Was Bad Again?
In case you forgot, Gearbox head Randy Pitchford was doing his very best to ruin whatever hype Borderlands 4 had going into launch, whether he intended to or not. The entire discourse about the game launching at $ 80 was completely unnecessary. So it was absolutely perplexing that he made it happen.
In hindsight, this did seem to cloud anything else that players were saying about the game. As we now know, it also created a discourse that was completely divorced from the reality of Borderlands 4’s pricing.
That may have created this strange cloud of negativity that was set to pounce on the game as soon as the opportunity came up. But it may also be part of this strange trend throughout this year of gamers being overly negative about games that are perfectly fine, or even good, just because they aren’t GOTY contenders.
We’re going out on a limb and guessing that Take-Two Interactive will be very happy to report about Borderlands 4 in the next financial meeting. That 85 % player dropoff will not be an issue at all, because as a retail priced game it already made most of its money at launch. And Borderlands 4 clearly made a lot of money for that launch.
