Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has weighed in on the Stop Killing Games initiative, and seems to have a complex opinion on the matter. This conversation arrives shortly before Gearbox launches Borderlands 4, and hits close to home for the company.
The Stop Killing Games Initiative followed the delisting of Ubisoft's The Crew, with concerns regarding game preservation and accessibility. The creator of the petition, Ross Scott, has pushed the initiative in the hopes of getting developers to change how games work as they approach the end of official support, by making those games playable on private or community servers instead of letting them become 100% unplayable. It's a movement that's drawn a lot of criticism and praise from different sides of the industry and among gamers, and now Pitchford has weighed in.
Randy Pitchford Admits He's 'Nervous' About One Aspect of Borderlands 4
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford admits he's 'nervous' about one particular aspect of Borderlands 4.
Randy Pitchford Talks About Game Preservation and The End of the Universe
In a chat with The Gamer, Randy Pitchford talked about Stop Killing Games and shared conflicted thoughts. He explained that he's lost games he's enjoyed too, and admires the activism involved in trying to protect them. But he also added that "if we're going to have any games that are sincere live services, it seems mutually exclusive to have something that's going to be a living thing that can't be allowed to die. I don't know how to get around that." Pitchford went on, pondering about life, death, and the eventual heat death of the universe. He noted that he thinks that fighting against the inevitability of an "end" lead to humans living longer lives, and that perhaps, in the future, "games could live even longer."
The comments made by Pitchford seem a bit wistful looking at the situation with game preservation and even existence itself. He seemed to appreciate the wish for games to stick around forever, and tied in the line of thought to Battleborn, Gearbox's own live service game that's now completely unplayable without the use of community-built mods. He noted that Battleborn was about the last star existing in the universe before nothing remains due to entropy, and says that he hates the fact that "everything will end."
Some of his thoughts have been echoed by others in the industry, like Ubisoft, with the CEO of Ubisoft saying nothing is eternal, or Video Games Europe arguing that sunsetting games is necessary for studios from a financial standpoint. All of this is a complex issue, raising questions of how practical it would be to adapt every live-service game to be playable on private servers, and whether fewer live-service games would be produced if developers knew that supporting a title in this way was required. However, the defense that everything will eventually end is also one that some members of the gaming community have been frustrated by, as no one is asking for games to be supported until the end of existence itself. For now, the movement remains unresolved, and it remains to be seen if it achieves the goal they're aiming for.
Borderlands 4
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 82 /100 Critics Rec: 88%
- Released
- September 12, 2025
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, In-Game Purchases, Users Interact
- Developer(s)
- Gearbox Software
- Publisher(s)
- 2K
