Bordering on Bad Behavior...
Gearbox Software is an overall good developer that has an issue with Public Relations that can mostly be attributed to one source altogether. The company in its inception was always fairly lucrative. Starting out under the guidance of CEO Randy Pitchford, the games studio created several add-on games to different properties developed by Valve, including Half-Life:Opposing Force and Half-Life: Counter Strike. This trend continued as they developed different ports, or versions of the game, for consoles like the Sony Playstation 2 and the failed Sega Dreamcast. Eventually, this trend came to a close as the developer began its first original game story Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 in 2005. This game launched a fairly successful series that would spawn several releases across multiple consoles until being bought by Gameloft for mobile sources. Gearbox's success wouldn't truly be as prominent, however until just after its work with Sega in 2008, one year after the two developed Samba De Amigo.
Gearbox released Borderlands in 2009 to a roaring success. The developer had always had a history with the first-person-shooter genre and it excelled here with quick run-and-gun elements mixed with heavy story-based role-playing elements. This quick spike to fame garnered a fair amount of attention in the company that thrust it forward onto the social media scene in a nearly explosive manner. Gearbox's website had been present for quite some time before Facebook and Twitter, but it didn't contain much beyond sparse news releases and previous projects/licences as well as employment opportunities. Now, the company, and by extension, Randy Pitchford now had open say on the internet.
Trouble began to build, then, after Gearbox bought the rights to Duke Nukem. 3D Realms had mostly abandoned the series for a decade and Gearbox sought to bring it back in order to finish off the series. The resounding failure of that goal was so extreme that the game did not score above a 60% in most popular games journalism sites. Despite this, Randy Pitchford continuously assured audiences on social media and in videos that the game was good and, according to an interview with IGN, "Radically exceeded my expectations." After this problematic scandal wherein players felt Pitchford was basically lying to them, Borderlands 2 was released in 2012 to even greater applause than the first iteration.
With an overall great game with positive advertising and PR, Gearbox was in a very healthy situation for a while. Releasing many, many downloadable content purchases for Borderlands 2, the game was a gift that kept on giving. This would all eventually come to a massive colliding halt upon the release of 2013's Aliens: Colonial Marines. With an astonishingly strong advertising campaign based around the Fox movie series by the same name, the game was to be published by Sega. Many game play videos circulated for this game with the most infamous being from the European Electronics Expo of 2012, wherein the game was shown to be dark, gritty, and have amazing systems based around the ferocity and power of the xenomorph enemies. The game was not that on release. Aliens: Colonial Marines was literally missing promised content shown and had features that had been completely cut out. With an uproar the likes of which has not been seen since, audiences lashed out as hard as possible with critiques, videos, forum posts, and social media questions. Randy Pitchford unfortunately answered to them.
With many responses similar to what's featured right, Pitchford set himself up for ire. Soon after, it was revealed that money Sega had sent to Gearbox to help on the game was instead funneled into further development for Borderlands 2 DLC and the hate grew stronger.
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel and Tales from the Borderlands were released as time went on with middling success as audiences were bitter about many practices by Gearbox which eventually culminated into the massive flop that was Battleborn. Meant as a way to combat Blizzard's Overwatch, Battleborn was a first-person shooter with character-based classes that focused around an arena with a singular objective. Just this year, the game has been made free to play in hopes of desperately attempting to bring in a player base whatsoever. Among all things, the creepiest way that this game was marketed has to be attributed to a point when Pitchford showed off a certain forum on Reddit that was devoted to creating pornography of the characters in the game.
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