It's Pretty Clear Why Borderlands 4 Has Lost 95% Of Its Players

It's that time of the videogame lifecycle again. "Borderlands 4" dropped on September 12, 2025, and it immediately delighted fans of the franchise. The game debuted to strong reviews, and players poured in by the thousands to loot and shoot their way through another wild adventure. At its peak of popularity, more than 300,000 players were exploring the world of Kairos simultaneously — and that's just the PC numbers.

Since then things have taken a turn. About 95% of those players had left "Borderlands 4" behind barely two months after the game's release. What's potentially worse is that Take-Two, the parent company behind "Borderlands" publisher 2K Games, has been left disappointed by the sales: CEO Strauss Zelnick has said that the numbers at launch were not as expected. Zelnick pointed to the PC version of "Borderlands 4," which was rife with crashes and bugs when it launched on Steam, as one potential reason for the lackluster sales.

Some games have lost their entire playerbase in 2025. Could "Borderlands 4" also end up on that list? There are some mundane reasons behind the dip in player numbers, but there are also real issues that make "Borderlands 4" a unique case. No game is going to hold onto its players forever, though it's worth taking a look at what exactly happened with the latest "Borderlands" title. Here's why it's already lost 95% of its players.

Firstly we need to address the elephant in the room: "Borderlands 4" is primarily a story-focused game with a straightforward campaign that players work through. It's full of side quests and opportunities for some FPS-style grinding, but, no matter how you approach "Borderlands 4," its story will keep pushing you forward. For a huge swath of gamers, experiencing the story is the point of the game, and after they've charged through the campaign, they're ready to put the game down.

Of course, everyone's experience will be different. It takes at least 27 hours to complete the main story of "Borderlands 4," but if you factor in side quests, you're looking at around 46 hours. If you want to explore every little nook and cranny of the game and complete it 100%, that will take at least 90 hours. Even so, we're now getting to the point where all types of players have finished their campaign and are putting the game down, hence the steep drop off in player numbers.

At their core, the "Borderlands" games are looter-shooters where finding the next shiny gun becomes just as exciting as the next plot twist. That means when the story is done and dusted, there's still a reason to keep playing. Ahead of the launch of "Borderlands 4," developer Gearbox took a page out of the live service playbook and released an ambitious roadmap laying out regular content drops. Those planned updates add even more reasons for players to keep going after they reach the finale of the story, so people can play "Borderlands 4" endlessly — at least in theory.

In practice, many players have been disappointed by the endgame content that they've discovered after finishing the main story. Players can do weekly missions, bounties, and continue grinding out boss battles waiting for the perfect weapon for their build to randomly drop. Eventually players will be able to use those perfect weapons against even stronger bosses when Gearbox adds more content to the game and releases paid DLC. For now, a pure love of the franchise is the only reason to chase the best loot the game has to offer, and for many players, that just isn't enough to keep them going.

The majority of players who are leaving "Borderlands 4" behind are doing so because they've finished the story and aren't interested in the endgame grind, but those aren't the only reasons people have abandoned the game. "Borderlands 4" launched with some genuine problems that completely ruined the experience for some players. Most gamers have felt the pain of losing a save file at least once in their lives, and, unfortunately, some "Borderlands 4" players ran into a glitch that completely erased the progress they had made in the game.

This glitch only impacted PC players, and it would rear its head when they tried to save. An in-game message would let them know that the game had failed to save and the only way to fix it was restarting. That could lead to some serious frustration, depending on how long someone tried to go between saves. That wasn't the only save-related problem that PC players faced, either: Another glitch prevented players from setting up an initial save file unless they jumped through extra hoops. Together, these two save glitches were undoubtedly enough to make some frustrated players throw up their hands and move on to a new game.

"Borderlands 4" is a perfectly fine game for someone looking for a single-player experience, but longtime franchise fans know that "Borderlands" games really shine when you play them with other people. Since the series debuted, cooperative play has been a major focus, and that's just as true with "Borderlands 4" as it has been with the other games. Sadly, this is another area where some technical issues have seemingly been driving people away from the game.

Arguably the biggest issue with multiplayer in "Borderlands 4" is a cheat used by some PC players online: The cheat allows toxic players to wildly manipulate the save files of their in-game partners. Early in the game's lifecycle, PC players were diving into a multiplayer session only to find their skill points completely changed, or, even worse, their character completely reset to level 1. To avoid the issue, players had to completely ignore the game's matchmaking feature and only play online with people they actually knew.

This rampant cheating undoubtedly drove some people away from the game, but, even putting that aside, the "Borderlands 4" matchmaking system leaves a lot to be desired. Players have complained online about the system being unreliable and having a distractingly bad user interface. On top of that, some of Gearbox's early patches for "Borderlands 4" introduced fresh matchmaking glitches for PC players. "Borderlands" fans demand a killer multiplayer experience, and so far the latest entry in the series hasn't delivered that.

There's another reason that gamers have been leaving "Borderlands 4" in the dust, and it has nothing to do with the game itself or any of the work that Gearbox has put into it. No matter how good a video game is, it's always going to have to compete with the newest, shiniest titles on the market, and sometimes the competition is more fierce than others. 2025 has been full of mind-blowing games, and the steady stream of top-tier releases didn't stop when Gearbox put out its latest game.

"Borderlands 4" debuted in early September, and for a brief moment it was the hottest game on the market. It didn't take long, however, for more highly anticipated titles to enter the scene. "Ghost of Yōtei" dropped in early October, and hot on its heels came "ARC Raiders." Both of those games offer massive worlds to explore and engaging combat to master. They're very different from "Borderlands 4," but as some of the most exciting releases of the year, they also pulled a ton of attention away from it.

Then there's games like "Call of Duty: Black Ops 7," which definitely scratches the FPS itch that the "Borderlands" series also appeals to. No game holds onto its players forever, but "Borderlands 4" came out at a particularly competitive time in the video game market. In that context, the game's initial performance is impressive, but it's not surprising that "Borderlands 4" lost a huge amount of players in just a handful of months considering what it's been up against.