Why isn’t Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel releasing on PS4 or Xbox One?

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel is only releasing on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC because they’re “the platforms that we know our customers have”, according to Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford.

Ruling out a release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in a presentation shown to VideoGamer.com earlier this week, Pitchford explained that The Pre-Sequel is “a new fully standalone game. It’s going to launch on the platforms that we know our customers have, so it’s going to launch on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC. There’s no next-gen version of Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.”

He later suggested that porting the game to next-gen would have moved resources away from the game itself, adding:

“It’s not free to build a game for next-gen, right? So when you’re deciding on where you’re going to spend your resources, I think we want to spend all of the attention we can on the game itself. If you try to imagine the set of Borderlands players that have already upgraded, that’s not 100 per cent. But if you try to imagine the set of, say, an Xbox One owner or PlayStation 4 owner that does not have a PS3 or Xbox 360, the difference there is so close to nil.”

Pitchford also discussed the decision to lead development on the game out of 2K Australia, explaining that Gearbox is too busy working on “new things” and building “technologies for new platforms” to dedicate resources.

“We love spending time in Borderlands but the truth is, we did at some point have to start dedicating our attentions towards building new things and towards the future and trying to figure out technologies for new platforms, and this cut into our ability to tend to this franchise we’d created,” Pitchford explained.

“Fortunately around the time when BioShock Infinite shipped over a year ago, some of the guys in 2K Australia working on that game became available,” he continued. “The 2K Australia team was free, and we worked out a deal where we could collaborate, 2K Australia could jump in and build us [and] build our fans a new Borderlands game.”

“We had an opportunity when we were finishing up on BioShock Infinite to work with the guys at Gearbox to expand the Borderlands world, which was awesome,” added 2K Australia general manger Tony Lawrence. “We’re all huge fans of Borderlands down in the studio. We had a lot of opportunity over the last decade or so working on the BioShock franchise so the idea of co-developing with the guys as talented as Gearbox was something we were really, really looking forward to. And that has been a fantastic relationship.”

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel launches this autumn on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. To find out more about the game, check out our preview.