Gearbox’s upcoming first-person shooter Borderlands 4 will release 11 days earlier than planned, as confirmed by development chief Randy Pitchford in a video that appears to have gone live early.
Borderlands 4 was due out September 23, but will now release on September 12 across PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Nintendo Switch 2.
In the video, Pitchford said: “Everything is going great, actually. In fact, everything is going kind of the best-case scenario. The game is awesome, the team is cooking, and so the launch date for Borderlands 4 is changing. We’re moving it forward. The launch date is now September 12.”
“What?! This never happens you guys! This never happens! We’re moving the launch date forward! You’re gonna get Borderlands 4 earlier!”
Pitchford added that the promised PlayStation State of Play focused on Borderlands 4 is due out imminently (Sony just announced it for tomorrow, April 30 at 2pm PT / 5pm ET / 11pm CEST).
Of course, there will be questions asked about whether the unexpected decision to bring Borderlands 4 forward has anything to do with the looming behemoth that is Grand Theft Auto 6. GTA 6 is currently still set for release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S at some point in the fall of 2025. That’s a vague release window that could end up consuming the likes of Borderlands 4, among other games. Has Borderlands 4 moved to give it more breathing room?
It’s worth noting that Borderlands 4 is published by 2K Games, which is owned by Take-Two. Take-Two is also the parent company of GTA developer Rockstar. At a high enough level, right up to CEO Strauss Zelnick, there will be a knowledge of all the company’s games, where they’re at in development, and a desire to give them all the best chance of success. Perhaps GTA 6’s release date recently came into focus, and it was felt that for the good of Borderlands 4, it should come out nearly two weeks earlier than planned.
If Borderlands 4 comes out September 12, we can perhaps rule out a GTA 6 release date during the same month and August. Could it come out in October? November? December 2025? All seem up for grabs now for GTA 6. The risk of course is that Take-Two ends up cannibalizing its big 2025 games by releasing them too close together. And let’s not forget Mafia: The Old Country, another 2K game, launches at some point summer 2025.
Could Take-Two’s big games, and by that we really mean GTA 6, end up doing more harm to each other than good by releasing too close to each other? That’s a question we put to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick in an interview conducted in February.
As you’d expect, Zelnick said Take-Two is planning its releases to avoid a risk of cannibalization, insisting the timing is driven by a desire to “respect the consumer’s need to spend a lot of time playing these hit games before they go on to the next.”
“No, I think we will plan the releases so as not to have that be a problem,” Zelnick said. “And what we found is when you’re giving consumers hits, they tend to be interested in pursuing other hits. In other words, I’ve said this many times, even when the hits aren’t ours, they’re a good thing for the industry. In this case, we hope that the hits will largely be ours. So we feel really good about it and I think that we will time our releases so as to respect the consumer’s need to spend a lot of time playing these hit games before they go on to the next.”
Amid all this speculation is of course the prospect that GTA 6 will be delayed either into early winter, or at some point in the first quarter of 2026.
“Look, there’s always a risk of slippage and I think as soon as you say words like absolutely, you jinx things,” Zelnick responded when IGN asked how confident he was that Rockstar would hit fall 2025 for GTA 6. “So we feel really good about it.”
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
