Game prices have been the subject of controversy since games had prices. How much is a game worth? What qualities or aspects of a game justify a higher price tag, or demand a lower one? Does a game that costs $70 deserve the same critical reaction as the identical game but $30? All this has gone on since time immemorial. But something that seems to rumble underneath so much of the discussion is rich people telling poor people that prices don’t matter. When asked about a potential $80 cost for Borderlands 4, multi-millionaire Randy Pitchford—CEO of developer Gearbox—told a potential customer, “If you’re a real fan, you’ll find a way to make it happen.”
Pitchford offered his reasoning for being so certain of this. In 1991 when he had just left high school and was working a minimum-wage job at an ice cream parlor on Pismo Beach, he was able to find a way to pay $80 for Starflight on the Sega Genesis. So, you know, so can everyone else. Pitchford sent the message as a reply on X last week, spotted by GamesRadar today.
Randy Pitchford grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, then California. His father worked in U.S. intelligence in the 1970s, and his house was filled with all manner of technology throughout his childhood. While I cannot say for sure (although I have emailed to find out), it seems vanishingly unlikely that Pitchford was living off of his minimum wage ice cream job after he’d graduated high school, as his tweet seems to want to heavily imply. Pitchford soon after went to UCLA, so we can quite safely guess that this was a short-term job, one for earning a bit of extra spending money while still living at home with his parents.
I would suggest that to use this anecdote to explain to all living humans that if they really want a copy of Borderlands 4, they can easily find eighty bucks to spare is grotesque. It kind of makes me sick.
Luxury viewpoints
“Video games are a luxury.” That’s a point many people want to make in situations like this. “If you can afford the console to play the game on...” people might begin, as they argue that you can’t really be that poor if you can still afford entertainment. All those people living on welfare, but with those giant TVs, etc. It’s a fascinating perspective, almost exclusively proffered by those who aren’t living on welfare, and have rarely truly wanted for anything. Because if there’s one thing that’s pretty damned desirable when you’re living in real poverty, it’s some option for positive entertainment. For so many others, furiously working and saving and scraping together the money to be able to buy their children a games console, to give them that one thing they so desperately want when they’ve had to go without so much else, is not an act of opulence but of enormous sacrifice.
So no, this isn’t about abstract situations made up by armchair philosophers trying to justify Pitchford’s claim by arguing that any truly poor person have to choose between food or games entirely. This is about reality, where a person might go without so much extra food, or only buy the very cheapest food, so that they can pull together the $60 that year to buy the new entry in their favorite gaming franchise. That little bit of light. And then they find out it’s maybe now going to cost $80 instead.
For 37 million Americans, there isn’t an extra $20
In 2023 (the most recent data), 23 percent of Americans worked in low-wage jobs. In 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 11.6 percent of Americans lived in poverty, a total of 37.9 million people. An example of “poverty” was given as “a family of three with income below $21,559.” In 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services describes poverty for an individual as living on less than $15,650 a year. This is all before the recent raids on welfare.
That breaks down to $1,300 a month. The average rental price for a one-bedroom apartment in the United States is $1,625 a month. The average monthly household expenses for a single person come to $4,641, including food, insurance, rent, cell phone, internet, and personal care. Even taking into account that these are averages, it’s pretty obvious that when you’re one of the one-in-nine people living on $1,300 a month, you don’t have a lot of spare piles of $80. In 2012 (soon after the crash), it was reported that the poorest people in America spent 98 percent of their income, with one dollar per day to save. That study showed this group spends 4.8 percent of their income on “entertainment,” a broad category that even includes pets. An $80 copy of Borderlands 4 is 6.2 percent of $1,300.
Jump forward to the pre-covid boom in 2019, and on an annual family household income of $25,525, total spending is measured to be $25,525. Of that, for an average family in this bracket, a total of $1,270 is spent on “entertainment.” That’s roughly $105 a month. But, again, it’s essential to understand that “entertainment” includes all sporting activities, all children’s extra-curricular education, toys, bikes, every electronic item from a TV to a camera, and even musical instruments and pets. If you own a dog, you’ll know that $105 a month could be taken up by it alone.
For so many of us, finding another $20 to buy a favorite game means grumbling and pulling out our wallet. But for so many others, it means not buying the one game we were hoping to play this year.
“But if you’re a real fan...”
Hopefully, this context suggests why it’s just so revolting for a man who sold his company for a potential $1.3 billion in 2021 to tell someone on X that “if you’re a real fan, you’ll find a way to make it happen.” Because, you know, when he was doing a summer job at the beach in California, he somehow pulled enough cash together for that game he wanted.
It’s gross. It sucks. I’m fed up of it. I’m sick of rich people telling poor people that they can find the money if they just try hard enough. I’ve had my fill of people who’ve never known hunger, never struggled to pay a bill, flippantly dismissing the concept that life is extremely tough for millions and millions of people. It’s the rhetoric that allows for the myth of the “welfare queen” to be so readily accepted, to assume that the poorest people just aren’t pulling their weight or working hard enough, that if these people were really poor, they wouldn’t be playing video games at all. It’s hateful.
As for whether Borderlands 4 will cost $80, Pitchford claims it’s “not my call,” having previously said it’s still undecided. Whether it will be worth $80—that’s entirely in the wallet of the beholder.
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