After all the anger and noise, Borderlands 4 isn't $80 anyway but there's a whopping expensive delux

After weeks of hand-wringing, outrage, ill-advised social media posts, and the sturm und drang of online gamer life, preorders are finally live and it is not, as some had feared, an $80 game. But if you want to throw nearly double the regular price at it, there's an on the table for that, too.

The base edition of Borderlands 4 goes for $70/£60/€70 —that's a [[link]] tenner less than the dreaded $80 price point that caused Randy Pitchford —while the Deluxe Edition is $100/£90/€100, and the Super Deluxe is $130/£120/€130. Here's what each edition gets you:

And here's a closer [[link]] look at what those different packs actually include:

So, more money, more content, ranging from weapon skins to new vault hunters, regions, and story missions—nothing too unusual there. Publisher Take-Two Interactive said full details on the additional content packs, which will be released as post-launch DLC, will be revealed "at a later date."

"The big news: No price increase for Borderlands 4!" Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford enthused on . "Standard Edition launches not at $80, but at $69.99! They’re showing you, so please show them," by which he means "show them" how much you appreciate the absence of a price increase by preordering the game.

Cynics and conspiracy theorists might pause a moment to wonder if perhaps all this uproar over a price increase, touched off when Pitchford dismissed concerns about an $80 price tag [[link]] because "a real fan" will just , was in fact a calculated move aimed at driving goodwill in hopes of boosting preorders: the ol' "it coulda been worse" stratagem that I have deployed, to varying degrees of success, throughout my life.

I've seen at least one post on X to that effect, implying that was the plan all along—hint at a higher price, then come in "lower" and score a PR win—but I don't actually think that's the case myself. Conversations about game prices, and price increases, have been going on for ages: It was just a few years ago that we were talking about , after all. Pitchford wasn't initiating a new round of that endless debate, just wading into some already-hot discourse.

Regardless, all that prior controversy doesn't seem to have hurt the cause, because for the most part Borderlands fans seem happy with the pricing: There are expressions of gratitude here and there for keeping the price at $70, and a few posts go so far as to credit the community blowback for forcing Take-Two to hold the line on the price. (We'll see how that stands up when GTA 6 comes out.)

There are also a handful posts complaining that the game costs too damn much even without an increase, particularly from gamers outside the US, UK, and EU. In Canada, for instance, the Super Deluxe edition costs $173, and for that kind of money I expect a game to come in a huge box with a statue in it, some stickers, and maybe a pack of sexy playing cards.

So after all the anger and drama, we end up more or less right back where we started, and probably with nothing learned. I have no particularly trenchant observations to make about the whole rigamarole, save this: We're all talking about Borderlands 4's 'lower than expected' price today, and the game has already elbowed its way into the , just a few hours after preorders went live. Make of that what you will.