Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford wanted Tiny Tina's Wonderlands campaign DLC, but there was "no way to do that and put the focus on Borderlands 4 that we needed to"

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands
(Image credit: 2K Games)

Borderlands 3 studio CEO Randy Pitchford wished Gearbox could have made "big campaign DLC" for Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, but says the dev couldn't spare the resources from Borderlands 4.

In a tweet last week, Pitchford responded to claims that Wonderlands had flopped. While the original message referred more to endgame support for the franchise spin-off than its sales, Pitchford said that the latter was solid, and that "Wonderlands was extremely far from a flop."

The lack of post-launch support for Wonderlands, however, seems to weigh relatively heavy on Pitchford's shoulders, as he goes on to say that "I wish we could've managed some big campaign DLC, but [there was] no way to do that *and* put the focus on Borderlands 4 that we needed to." 

Gearbox gave the impression that Tiny Tina's Wonderlands' success came as a big surprise - after its release in 2022, the company said that the spin-off had "shattered all of our target expectations" and become a massive financial success. Even back then, it was made clear that more Wonderlands was on the horizon, but it seems as though there simply wasn't time to commit to major expansions.

Pitchford himself was hinting at a new Borderlands game as early as 2021, and one developer tweet suggests that the ideas behind Borderlands 4 were already in place when Wonderlands launched. Pitchford says he's "so sorry" he wasn't able to talk about the situation around Wonderlands at the time, complaining that "the world is the world" - big new reveals tend to be planned out, and not simply tweeted because they're getting in the way of spin-off DLC. Either way, in spite of the movie, it seems as though the future of Borderlands video games remains pretty bright.

Putting the Borderlands 4 reveal just 2 weeks after the Borderlands movie's $90m flop is being hailed as Randy Pitchford's ultimate "big brain move"

Ali Jones
News Editor

I'm GamesRadar's news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.