After announcing Borderlands 4 for Steam, Randy Pitchford revisits his prediction of store’s death

videogameschronicle.com:

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has revisited comments he made in 2019 predicting that Steam could be a “dying store” by now, following the news that Borderlands 4 will launch on the platform.

In 2019, the last Borderlands game, Borderlands 3, was announced as an Epic Games Store exclusive – a controversial decision at the time, due to Steam’s stranglehold on PC game sales.

In a lengthy Twitter thread following the 2019 news, Pitchford had claimed that “when we look back at Steam in five or ten years, it may look like a dying store”, and pointed to Epic’s significant investment into its own platform, and more attractive commercial terms.

After Borderlands 4 was announced for Steam this week, Pitchford’s comments unsurprisingly began recirculating on social media, prompting the exec to publish a fresh response.

Pitchford stated that he had high hopes for the Epic Games Store, which he claimed had ultimately been overly optimistic.

However, the exec claimed that Borderlands 3 and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands “demonstrated clearly” that “the customers show up for the games, not the store front” with their launches on the Epic Games Store, and bemoaned Steam competitors “shoot[ing] themselves in the foot”.

“If Epic successfully pressed its advantage, [Steam dying] may have been the case. But Epic did not,” he wrote. “So, famously, Steam does very little to earn the massive cut they take and continues its effective monopoly in the West while would-be competitors with much more developer friendly models continue to shoot themselves in the foot.

“I am a Steam customer and Steam developer that will continue to root for and support competition. Borderlands 3 and Wonderlands demonstrated clearly that the customers show up for the games, not the store front.

“But the industry gives Steam their monopoly because publishers are afraid to take the risk to support more developer and publisher friendly stores. It’s all very interesting and there is a huge amount of opportunity in the PC gaming space