New Borderlands old-gen only because "that's where demand lives"

With confirmation that a new Borderlands title is in the works came the news that it's not being developed (currently anyway) for Xbox One or PlayStation 4.

Gearbox's Randy Pitchford gave a few reasons when queried about the decision, stating that it's a mixture of lower install bases ("there are fewer Xbox Ones and PS4s than we sold copies of Borderlands 2") and financial viability ("it's not free to build a game on next-gen").

"When you're deciding where to spend your resources, I think we want to spend all of the attention we can on the game itself," he rationalised when asked directly about the decision, explaining that not everybody's upgraded to the newer systems, but nearly everybody who has a newer system also owns one of the older consoles.

"If you imagine where that demand lives," he said, "it lives on the Xbox 360, PS3, PC. We don't know to what extent it will live on the next-gen.

"...If you try and imagine the set of Borderlands players have already upgraded, that's not 100 percent. But, if you try and imagine the set of Xbox One owners or PS4 owners that don't have a Xbox 360 or PS3? That difference is close to nil. You can't make a business rationalisation around that."

When asked why Gearbox simply just use funding to create Borderlands 3, Pitchford stated that the team was already stretched thin on working with their new next-gen IP, and that while they loved the world, they needed to get on "with new stuff". But that the demand was such, that they worked out this collaboration with 2K Australia to make new content.

"Because Borderlands 2 did so well, there's obvious demand there," he said. "We haven't been able to serve it sufficiently with just DLC... we're still arguing inside of Gearbox about how much our own time we should spend in the Borderlands space versus our future things."