Randy Pitchford's Desperate Measures

In a desperate bid to remind people of Battleborn, Randy Pitchford took to twitter earlier today to announce the creation of a subreddit, dedicated to pornographic images of characters from the failing game. (Mirror)

*Mod Edit to remove link to page full of no-no bits. Pitchford's tweet said "VERY NSFW, but I have received reports that BattlebornRule34 is now a thing on Reddit. LINK WITH CAUTION:"*

The Gearbox CEO who saw his game absolutely steamrolled by Overwatch even before it was released, made the announcement a mere 9 hours after he created the creation of the SubReddit and Reddit users were quick to point out his motherfucking bullshit in a number of posts that quickly rose to the top of the board.

It is well known that Overwatch, which sees adoration from pornography connoisseurs and gamers alike, remains successful because of Blizzards excellent designers and business sense. Even the recent announcement of the game's first officially gay character, which was expected to be met with "gamer outrage" from several outlets, has been massively supported by advocates of the LGBT community and people who were already having cheeky wanks to Tracer x Widowmaker SFMs... Something which Gearbox's "hobby-grade e-sports" title has been unable to capitalize on.

More on this story as it unfolds.

Oh, dear. Just go F2P on all platforms already...

I don't get it. It's just a tweet on his personal account. I mean, his previous tweets are about brunch. This hot take seems like a stretch.

I build hobby grade models and would like people to stop reinforcing this guys use of it as a business term for his terrible game.

Wow. Not only is that really quite lame, but hardly anyone on reddit seems to know about it or care. Fitting right in with their actual game releases, even Gearbox scandals are DOA now.

Well he did succeed in getting some attention for Battleborn.

Is this Twitter drama? Are people actually mad? Seems a bit like dogpiling on a dude who doesnt seem to care, and hasnt done for awhile.

I think it's pathetic people still treat anything sexual as a strong taboo. So he linked to a subreddit that had porn from one of the videogames he put out. From his personal account. Which you would only see if you're following the guy already. How exactly is this trying to get attention? Only people who already pay attention would see that, except that now you also spread the word yourself. I don't see him on these boards posting these links. Who cares what he says from his personal account? That's like saying he's not allowed to think the Battleborn porn is funny.

I have no love for Randy as he seems to make all the wrong decisions as far as I can tell after Borderlands 2. But I don't see something wrong here apart from the fact that sex is still taboo for a lot of people.

Is Blizzard linking to professionally produced videos of Overwatch porn? For that matter, is ANY developer of AAA video games linking to any sort of pornography staring their characters?

It just seems unprofessional, and yes, a little desperate.

Rule 34 exists for a reason. It's not a surprise to anyone. The whole idea is that on the internet you can find pornography of ANY character you can think of. To even post this in the first place comes with an implication of "look, even our failure of a game that no one cares about has people wanting to bone our characters!"

It's kind of sad, and unless someone from that reddit page sent Randy Pitchford a tweet about it--which could be easily verified--that means that either:

A) Randy Pitchford himself created that sub-reddit himself, and 9 hours later tweeted about it.

B) People at Gearbox frequently look for Battleborn porn, and do so often enough that they spotted a reddit page 9 hours after it was created.

C) People at gearbox are constantly googling "Battleborn" and their CEO thought it would be a good idea to tweet about a porn sub-reddit that they found from doing so.

None of those possibilities look anything less than sad.

@spaceinsomniac: The dude behind Nier found out about people making up-skirt pictures and butt-shots of B2 from the game and asked them to zip them all up and send them to him on Twitter. That's about the closest I can think of.

@zevvion - That's not entirely how Twitter works. Randy is followed by a lot of people, including a lot of industry people. He puts a message like this out, it gets retweeted (for now it's just over 60 retweets) and hopefully it gets picked up by the media and they run a story on it. Look out for it later on Kotaku or something.

Why though? I mean, the game is not worth playing even 100% free. Your time is worth more than the game.

When Overwatch is getting professionally produced adult video parodies made with their characters, there's just something sad about Pitchford posting the equivalent of, "hey, we also have people making porn about our characters!" For me at least, it's not that sex is taboo, it's that he thought this needed to be mentioned.

Randy Pitchford seems like he's a big ol' doofus.

@spaceinsomniac

Is it really on him that everyone (apparently the people who think this is a scandal too) repeats and reposts what he says? Shouldn't you be upset at Kotaku at that point, if they made this a story, for reporting on something you find pointless?

I don't know, I guess I'm 'liberal' or whatever you want to call it, but I don't think he is speaking for anyone besides himself and that's fine. Not claiming it's a fantastic post I wish I saw earlier, but that can be said for 98% 100% of Twitter posts to be honest.

its always people with anime avatars

No one should have to stand up and say "look, rule 34 applies to our characters too!" If someone feels the need to point that out, it's not a very good sign of the popularity of their characters. That's where the pointless part of this comes into play. "Gearbox CEO links to hardcore pornography of its characters" is not a pointless news story, especially considering the context and history of the game's comparisons to Overwatch.

Also, I'm liberal when it comes to consensual adult material as well, but directly linking to pornography isn't something that company executives generally do, and it wouldn't be hard to make the argument that doing so was unprofessional.

*clicks link*

"Randy gets a facial."

You reap what you sow, idiot.

I'm saying, as a strategy for attracting players, it would be far more productive and dignified than trying to drum up "Battleborn porn!" on twitter and reddit.

@spaceinsomniac: Maybe it is "unprofessional" (I honestly don't know what that means in the context of a personal Twitter account), but the take that this is most likely a desperate measure to promote his game kinda came out of nowhere? I mean, the tweet is silly and all, but that conclusion (as amusing as it is) is assuming a lot. This overblown response to the tweet just seems mean-spirited to me.

Oh dear, I really hope he did not actually create it himself, that's quite embarrassing.

I still say Pitchford's most pathetic moment has to be when he lied about the origin of the name Gearbox:

http://www.giantbomb.com/gearbox-software-llc/3010-1615/forums/do-you-still-trust-gearbox-1775677/?page=1#js-message-7988775

I don't think he's ever going to top that one.

@spaceinsomniac: Not to defend Pitchford or anything but it's probably pretty normal for most developers to have google alerts on their products, either personally or at least some community manager or something that keeps track of things.

The fans will create the art and subreddit for these types of things, not the creators. Thing is, this only really happens when the product itself is worth two shits. Battleborn however, is worth less than two shits. You couldn't pay me to play that absolute worthless flaming trashcan of a game.

Good point. I forget those are a thing, sometimes.

Although that still leaves us with the fact that he thought posting about it would be a good idea.

I read an article earlier this year that basically said Gearbox was about to go the way of the dodo. This seems like a tweet a CEO would make when his company was in its death throes.

@dudeglove: Maybe you're thinking of David Jaffe? I think one time he went on a YouTube rant about the GB community.

Oh I don't know http://www.siliconera.com/2017/01/09/yoko-taro-shares-cheeky-comments-nier-automatas-butt-controversy-surrounding-2b/

Well, he didn't link it directly, either.

Edit: Jesusphish already mentioned it.

@rongalaxy: Good times. http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/drawn-to-death-674188/drawn-to-death-character-responds-to-giantbomb-com-1501937/

I tried to find a mirror of the original. I did not.

God bless you Dailymotion.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cayx9_drawn-to-death-gofuckyourself_videogames

Did they already burn through all that Borderlands cash?

I guess I never gave enough of a shit about the Alien or Borderlands IP to care this much about a guy and his company. This seems like the doofiest gaff he's done, and wouldn't seem bad at all if people didn't already have it out for him.

lmao at him pulling out the rule 34 card. Dude is shameless.

I find it hard to believe that there are people who care about this game enough to draw porny pictures of its characters. Now I'm a little bit curious because I can't even name a single character from this game. I might look this up. I have low expectations, though.

@adequatelyprepared: Oh right, Drawn to Death. Does anyone know what happened to that game?

@whatshisface: It was in some video at some Sony event a while ago but that's about it.

@sloppydetective: I don't know, his little song at PAX was up there as well...

Personally, it's the whole Alien Colonial Marines thing that really ruffled my feathers. Aliens Colonial Marines was SEGAs big bet on a AAA success. They were on the ropes financially and needed a big hit to come back. Randy convinced them he could deliver that hit, took their money, used them to fund Borderlands 2 development and then got TimeGate Studios to finish the missing 90% of the Aliens game for them. Aliens came out, was massively unsuccessful and forced SEGA to close offices in the US and completely drop potential localization of Valkyria Chronicles 3 and putting the Yakuza series on hiatus. All things considered, us Yakuza fans are pretty lucky that Sony stepped up to the plate and made the localization of Yakuza 5, Yakuza 0, Yakuza Kiwami and Yakuza 6 happen.

There was some lawsuits happening about Gearbox' squandering of SEGA's money, but Randy weaseled himself out of it.

SEGA is slowly getting back on their feet now, so it's not a big deal for me any more, but I still think it's funny to see him getting put on blast... If not for the Duke Nukem fans who are the latest victims of Randy Pitchford.

something something hobby grade joke something something

I don't necessarily care that Randy Pitchford decided to let the world know that Battleborn characters are being used in pornographic materials and that there is a subreddit dedicated to it. I mean, that's his call. More power to him, I guess.

On the other hand, the internet is a wonderful cornucopia of any fictional character you can think of combined with any weird fetish, either written, drawn, animated or badly acted. Sometimes it even reaches a professional level (see Jim Sterling's reviews of porn parodies) and other times it remains the fringiest of fringe, living and breathing in spaces like DeviantArt and Reddit. So, when I see Randy Pitchford loudly saying "Hey look over here at this!" like it's news or something, I'm like, "Yeah, no duh Randy..."

It just smacks of desperation. I know that Battleborn didn't do as well as they would have liked, but there are ways to make people care about it without pointing to a super niche porn subreddit. Making it entirely free to play right now, coordinating events with the community (like they did with Borderlands 2 and their $100,000 Loot Hunt), anything else besides "People make porn of our game!" which is like saying "Humans need to eat food and drink water to survive!" at this point, imo.

But hey, if that's what he wants to point out about his game, he's free to do so. I just feel like there are better ways to get eyeballs and interest back and focused on his product.

This should probably just leave to the game shutting down. Not in a "Battleborn shouldn't exist", or "I want this game to shut its servers down", or "This game is bad, so just give up" kind of way. More from the perspective of what do you do after the face of your game promotes that? The next tweet should be "Well, that's all I got. Goodbye Battleborn".

My point was more that you're calling it unprofessional because he linked to sexual content. If he linked to fanart that was not sexual in nature, you wouldn't call it a scandal. I just think being upset at something like this or even calling it unprofessional would make sense if this guy was your doctor, teacher or boss or something. I honestly don't see why it matters for a dude that is trying to sell you videogames. Even if, anywhere, someone is more likely to buy Battleborn after watching Battleporn, what is the problem in that?

Its telling that Battleborn was never mentioned at the GOTY deliberation for any category.

@forteexe21: And it's not even the worst game of 2016. It's just... nothing, really.

Not even Hottest Mess or Worst Game! Battleborn was SO forgettable and mediocre, it couldn't even crack the shit categories. It's like when an actor wins the Razzies: it's not great, but at least it's an acknowledgement that you're a famous person.

Battleborn couldn't even get being terrible right.

Right, so last years e-Sports Game That Nobody Cared About award probably goes to Battleborn. The year before that it was Evolve. What do you all think it'll be this year? Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands? Or is Ubisoft too smart not be roped into pushing their games like that unless they can do it with reasonable confidence?

@darkbeatdk: Ubisoft are too busy fighting off a hostile takeover to worry about eSports. But also they've never tried to push their games as eSports. Rainbow 6 Siege makes for interesting watching when you look at high level players but even then any events are "community" driven as opposed to Ubisoft trying to force an eSport on us.

Wildlands isn't PVP so it's highly unlikely to pick up any sort of eSport status.

@darkbeatdk: Is For Honor esports? Id see that take it before Wildlands as that at least is an established IP. Unless 2K releases another eports game this year to go for the 3-peat.

Seems silly to me, and a deliberate way to get people to think about battleborn again for a second. You can't tell me the man just suddenly decided to share rule34 content about his game impulsively for no reason. Im sure borderlands has had its fair share for him to be surprised about, so why is battleborn so important to share? It looks tacky and only makes people compare the game to overwatch even more. You want to distance yourself from that game Randy, not try to make it look like yours is just as popular. Just hurry up and make Borderlands 3.