Randy Pitchford is at it again: shares video of animal cruelty on twitter - Sensationalist Headlines

And isn't that the message that should be being sent? That you won't pay for it? Corporate doesn't care about people liking their work if they're not getting any money from it. They don't see "interest" in piracy, they see "lost money".

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/131/c2063ca3-707d-4945-9c9a-149cebe1baf1/image.png Condiment king aint got shit on him

No, the message that should be sent is "fuck you I hope you die I'm not touching any of your products". When Borderlands 3 comes out, some amount of people will buy the game. Likely a much larger number of people will pirate it. A corporation will look at this and see massive demand for their product -- just with a large percentage refusing to pay for it. To corporate, this says they need to crank up the DRM or lower the price and stuff microtransactions in to make up the difference, not fire their asshole CEO and revise corporate policies. It means their marketing works but their anti-piracy failed, so they're incentivized to fuck with even more anti-consumer DRM. If you really want to send a signal to Gearbox/Take Two, deny they even exist. If Gearbox is really that bad, nobody should want their products, and pirating their products tells them you like what they do but you don't want to pay for it. They're going to find ways to stop you from pirating it and they won't do a goddamn thing about Randy or their policies. Consider what message gets sent if only 1 million people buy or pirate Borderlands 3. Now consider what Gearbox/Take Two will see when BL3 gets 1 million sales and, I dunno, 50 million pirated downloads. If you were a high-up at Gearbox, you're telling me you wouldn't be in shock if the former numbers came in when you were expecting the latter?

I'd think Twitter would work much better (in terms of moderation) if there were user-created communities that were also community moderated.

But people DO want Borderlands 3. If my options are "play destiny", "Play anthem" or "tell Randy Pitchford he can suck my fat cock", I'm going with the latter. There's literally nothing that can be done to remove Randy from this company. NOTHING. 2k can't fire him, or remove. He's in that place, forever, or until he decides he wants to go. There aren't higher ups at Gearbox beyond Randy. He is the sole owner and proprietor of the company IIRC. He will never, ever, ever be removed.

The downside of a boycott is that you don't get to enjoy the thing. Pirating the game isn't going to make Gearbox go up in flames, but if everyone could just get the fucking balls up to say "no, my entertainment cannot require compromising on my morals" and deadname anything Randy touches it might send him a message other than "get better DRM lol". 2K can't fire him but they sure as hell can sever ties if Randy becomes too strong a liability. And seeing a consumer revolt against Gearbox on the principle of not even touching a Gearbox product, as opposed to the principle of not paying for stuff, might rock the boat more than the expected piracy will.

I mean, I don't believe that's the case. Executives will do literally anything they can do to shift blame. Randy, if he was directly blamed for this and his entire studio fails to get any sales on all projects, will just take his ball, and go home. He'll close the studio, and take the money they did make with him. He doesn't LOSE in any situation you can concoct. He's untouchable by anything we do, because he can determine his own fate here, which alternates between "fucking the customer" and "fucking the studio". The problem with a "boycott" as well is we really can't rely on gamers to do so. There's no time where gamers follow through with boycotts as a whole, as a group.

Well, I'm not going to play Borderlands 3 and I'm going to sleep soundly at night. If I pirated it I'd feel gross, even if I didn't give Gearbox money for it. Take Two is already dead to me because of how they and R* handled Shark Cards while effectively neglecting GTAO in every way unless it threatened their Shark Cards, but even if it wasn't the case I'd be ignoring Gearbox's existence. And boycotts sure as hell never work when the default attitude is "it won't work" so enjoy more of the same forever I guess.

Why is he still employed

I've participated in 5, maybe 6 boycotts where I never bought the product. Yet, the "masses" did. So what am I supposed to do? Miss out on a game that brought me and my wife together 10 years ago? We've literally waited for the majority of our relationship to play this game, together. We have NO ALTERNATIVES. They don't exist. There aren't games like this available to me in any "alternative" form. I can't play Destiny or Anthem or any fucking garbage looter shooter with her. I guess we won't be playing this game together either. For you, that's fine. That's literally just missing out on a game you don't really care about. It's a bit different for myself. Will I be buying this? No. Am I going to pirate it? Maybe, I don't know yet. I do know that just saying "well you aren't boycotting it, so it's not going to work". No, I have enough fucking experience seeing gamers not fucking follow through that I don't really feel like depriving myself of shit that no one else is. I'm not making a difference by being one of 10,000 people. You aren't either. You're just lying to yourself if you think that those numbers will change any "executives" mind.

Seen what's been happening with the EGS lately? And Battlefront II: The Microtransactioning? Things are changing and you're not gonna start an avalanche if you piss on the snowball before it gets rolling.

It doesn't change the fact the games on EGS are selling fine on consoles though. Consoles, where games make most of their money, anyways. I'm missing out on a title I've waited for for years, with the exclusive promise of being able to play a couch co-op game with my wife. I get that you, and everyone else who wants to punish Gearbox are in the right by not purchasing the game. I do not think, that the argument "piracy will show them the wrong message" is correct however. There are literally, and have been literally 0 games for me and her to play in that vein. There will continue to be no games like that, as they're not fucking made anymore. BL3 fills that niche that no game has since BL2. So, I'm relatively conflicted here, and I don't feel like pirating it sends the message you argue it does.

He owns it Sad, I know

How long is it gonna take 2K to force this fucking moron out of the company?

He can never be forced out. He is the sole executive at Gearbox with the ability to change that. He will never leave, under any circumstances.

I hate Pitchford as much as the next guy, but can we please just not do this. This is so overblown. Yes, by strictest definition this is animal abuse and the person who made the video is terrible for putting that crab and the cat together like that, but to the average person this just seems like a funny video of a cat getting too close to a crab. Randy probably just saw it and shared it because he thought it was funny and didn't look into it, and of course he's going to try to justify himself because that's just what a fucking human does. That doesn't make him a psychopath or is what makes him a terrible person. What makes him a terrible person is shit like actually physically abusing his employees, and stealing their fairly earned dues for his own purposes. Too often I see Pitchford being attacked for such small shit like being an sjw or that one cringey photo of his, but all that seems to do is hide the true actual crimes and horrid shit this man has committed. To us that seems okay because we know what he's done, but to people not in the know or outside of the gaming industry, it just seems like people are attacking this man for being a human, not the shitty person he actually is.

I'm more than aware that Randy is somewhere on the spectrum but that reaction is just utterly bizarre. I can't imagine what working with him must be like.

2K doesn't own Gearbox. They're just publishing games for them. Gearbox has no board, no shareholders. Just Randy.

And if 2K cut them loose, another publisher would surely take their place. The games industry as a whole does not give a single shit about their dime wage employees. Nothing is actually going to change unless the industry unionizes. So boycotts aren't going to do a damn thing.

He looks like a greasy cringy disgusting fat bastard

Doesn’t stop him from falling back on them for an excuse

He's like that overly drawn-out seemingly neverending super dramatic hyper cinematic trainwreck from Call of Duty WW2

We were going through a rough patch 8 years ago or so and we were at our wits end with each other. I didn't know what to talk to her about, so I just said "I"m going to play a game", I booted up Borderlands on my Xbox360 and carried on with my save. After a few minutes she asked what game it was, and if she could play, I gave her the controller and let her have fun for a bit. Half an hour later we were playing new characters together on split screen and it helped us get over a rough patch. We beat Borderlands 1 and 2 and spent a fair bit of time going back to them over the years, but they show their age now and we've seen all the content in the games multiple times over now. The series had a goofy tone that she enjoyed and could get into with gameplay that appealed to both of us and was really one of the things that helped bring parts of our early relationship together, and got her into gaming more than she was before. We've sought out replacements for them but they don't really exist, couch co-op has pretty much gone the way of the dodo, and we've been eagerly awaiting having Borderlands 3 to scratch that itch. Every year she asks me "have you heard anything about Borderlands 3 yet" and when it finally announced and we got to watch the trailers for it, we were both pretty giddy with excitement because how that's just something we don't have anymore. Going back to the same old well only works so many times. Games like Destiny, Anthem, The Division, whatever other looter shooter I know I'm forgetting, she's not interested in those, and I can't blame her. They don't look that intriguing really, I played Destiny, and found it pretty lacking, even D2. It's just not a niche anyone's providing for anymore it seems.

"i wanted to see how you'd react" fuck off i said this shit when i was a retarded 12 year old and it was stupid then, aren't you in your mid forties or something

Yeah that's hella sweet. Glad you guys are alright. I think what Borderlands does best is to create a semi plausible, semi realistic world, with a goofy side to things that can be seen through in much more serious ways. The way how we got made up arms manufacturers that do more than just weapons, and corporate doings sounding kind of realistic, despite the villainous bits which tbh are sounding way too real for confort nowadays. It's a fantasy universe that looks kind of real. Relatable, in a way. And it isn't supposed to be taken seriously, but if you do, theres an interesting story behind almost everything, which imo is one of the game's strong suits. Destiny seems like a load of "you are the chosen one" super fantasy alien magic kind of stuff that IMO doesn't looks all that interesting, and takes itself way too seriously. The Division is just there I guess. I think the whole thing about it was just the NY map or something, I can't really tell.

The best part of the Borderlands Universe, IMO, is a lot of the crazy shit can be singlehandedly justified by the fact that a corporation has made death itself a triviality. Like the guy who gleefully pays you to blow his head off. Which was why it was so fucking stupid that Anthony Burch went and said that the New-U machines weren't canon. One of the fucking DLC's relied on them as a plot device, you hack! And why the hell did you cut those lines that explained that Angel hacked into the new-U machines? They literally patch the biggest plot hole in Borderlands 2!

A reminder to people to skip over Borderlands 3. It doesn't look that amazing (although this is persona opinion and I may be jaded) and to tell you the tru 2k, and other publishers, could decide they never want to do business with Gearbox again. Unlikely, but in your super theoretical (and impossible) example of BL3 selling only one copy... yeah no, if it was quite literally the worst selling game of all time then very few publishers would want to work with him, both because he's toxic and for more fiscal reasons

He should've just said that his little brother was on his account instead

Fuck man I posted fucked up emergency room wounds on some site when I was 12 and made this that same sort of excuse. I'd like to thank Randy Pitchford for somehow simultaneously making me feel worse about myself by reminding me of how much of a retard I was when I was 12 and also making me feel better about myself that I'm not that same retard but also 48.

Show us a single example of a mass gamer boycott actually working. 'cause every instance I can think of failed miserably when pretty much everyone who claimed they were gonna boycott was playing it on launch night.