Borderlands 4 made its paid Bounty Pack free, but that did not move the needle on its playercount at all. How come?
In the case of Borderlands 4, no, I do not believe that we should do the whole “Borderlands has lost 96.4% since launch” thing based on Steam charts , given that it is a game with a campaign with a beginning and end, and not a traditional live service, as uch.
Granted, Gearbox wants you to continue to grind, and it does have a “weekly reset” with rotating activities, but sure, it’s notafter Borderlands 4’s first Bounty Pack, which is a paid addition to the game, and included in the year of content, which includes four packs total and two larger story packs. In this case, however, at the last minute, Gearbox decided to make the Bounty Pack free for all players.Probably not, and the answer is November 20, and the following weekend was more or less level with the previous one. That’s…something for a paid pack that Gearbox activelyThe Bounty Pack wasn’t nothing. After all, Gearbox asks people to pay for these. It had some holiday-themed story content, including a new boss, the launch of a new Vault Card with 24 cosmetics and re-rollable Legendary Gear. I imagine it was made free because of A) consistently declining playercounts and B) the game just had one of the worst Halloween events in video game history, and I am not exaggerating when I say that.Reception to the Bounty Pack was generally “it’s okay,” so that wouldn’t exactly inspire other players to go out and try it, even for free. Everyone has been busy with ARC Raiders, Black Ops 7 and a number of other releases. Even still, flipping paid content to free with little result seems less than ideal. Borderlands 4’s bigger tests are yet to come. There’s the release of the first Invincible boss in December, a “true” bit of endgame content, in addition to another Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode difficulty level. That’s free, as well. There’s another Bounty Pack to start Q1 2026 . The biggest content addition will be Mad Ellie and the Vault of the Damned, a true expansion that will feature a new Vault Hunter for the first time since the Pre-Sequel. That will hopefully spike players as a significant reason to return.Borderlands 4 has had a successful 2025. It peaked with 300,000 players and is one of the higher-selling games of the year so far. There is mixed reporting on whether it sold less or more than Borderlands 3 over the same period, but the claim that BL4 sold half of BL3 does not jive with the reveal that it generated more dollar sales than any game in the history of the franchise . I do think it’s fair to keep an eye on the long-term success of the game. While I know no one wants to call it a live service, and I agree with that to an extent, this is a game that wants players to stay engaged with long-term grinding, it has weekly reasons to return to the game with resets, it has frequent holiday events and these bounty packs and upcoming free updates and DLCs. The cadence is pretty…live service-y, if you really step back and look at it. We’ll see how the Invincible boss changes things in December. Hopefully, it performs better than this paid-to-free Bounty Pack.
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