It’s that time of year again. The holidays are fast approaching, and that means that soon, all sorts of things will be on sale for events like Black Friday. In fact, there are many people, including gamers, who look forward to Black Friday and subsequent sales events due to all the great deals they’re likely to get when the days hit. Sure enough, multiple companies, developers, and publishers have revealed some of their Black Friday deals, and that includes Amazon. One thing that some have noticed, though, is that Borderlands 4 is not only on the list of deals, but that it has a huge discount going on.
If you go to the Amazon store page for Borderlands 4 and click on the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game, you’ll notice that they’re over 30% off! That brings the game to $48! Oh, but there’s more! While the Steam code and the Xbox digital code prices are the same, the price for the Nintendo Switch 2 version is 20% off…and that version isn’t even out yet!
So, what is going on here? It will depend on who you ask. Yes, there are plenty of games available for sale on Black Friday, as we mentioned, and some you may even call “recent enough,” but the title from Gearbox Software has only been out a little over two months! That’s not long at all, in the grand scheme, and it’s rare for something like it to have such a huge discount that short into its life.
Sadly, the answer to why it got discounted, and why it CONTINUES to be discounted, even when not near a holiday, is that its quality has been called into question many times, and by many people, ever since it launched. Specifically, the launch of the game was a near-disaster, and thanks to repeated issues that fans have called out, plus the backlash of Randy Pitchford chewing out fans who “dared to insult it,” the word-of-mouth about the game hasn’t been good at all.
It hasn’t helped that the post-launch content hasn’t been the best, including the Halloween content being buggy and lame in its own right. Even Take-Two Interactive admitted that the game’s sales numbers were “softer than expected,” and that could have helped expedite the discounts, so that people will be more willing to buy it since it’s “much cheaper than usual.”
We’ll see if it helps the game’s sales numbers.
