Gearbox Co-Founder Compares Company's Success Rate To The Beatles, And Fans Aren't Happy

Satire has died and CEOs tap dance on its grave.

Who else but Randy?

Man, Randy Pitchford and the Beatles? Not the first time he's been connected to something from the past. Google Randy Pitchford Medieval Times for more info.

This is honestly the least offensive thing he has ever said/did.

The Beatles are so overrated.

@Bret well played.

He’s such a moron. Regardless of personal taste, the Beatles are indisputably important in so many more ways than this clown is.

@Darkthany How can you say such a thing? Beatles play an important role in our eco system. For instance they promote healthy plant growth and feed off of parasites that effect livestock.

Beatles are wonderful insects that are actually underrated.

"How DARE you call me lazy! Muhammad Ali flopped onto the floor for a living, how come he gets a pass but not me?!?!"

@DripDropCop146 bugs in general just get so much flack for literally no reason, like theyre just little friends they aint doin nothin to you😭

Is Borderlands bigger than Jesus?

Maybe comparing themselves to Beatles wasn't particularly good idea, but the sentiment isn't actually that bad. If you take risks, sometimes you will inevitably fail. However, if you don't take risks, you will likely never make anything worthwhile.

I mean ... I'm not really sure what the problem is, that statement is a pretty accurate and extremely healthy world view. You miss 100% of the swings you don't take, so don't get discouraged if you only hit 25% of the ones you do take. Very reasonable and uncontroversial statement.

Looking at the comments (and based on the demographics) this is a lenses of history thing. A Beatles fan today thinks everything is gold because only the gold is still in the zeitgeist. At the time, there was a ton of fan backlash to the experimental phase, both Sargent Pepper and the White album where seen by some fans and most critics as disasters. Revolution 9 doesn't get a lot of play today, but at the time it caused OUTRAGE. And really... as a song, it's probably objectively worse then Borderlands is as a movie.

I think it's extremely unlikely that future generations see the Borderlands movie as a masterpiece unappreciated in it's time ... but hey, stranger things have happened.

That's like Gearbox saying they're bigger than Jesus. John Lennon got in hot water for that opinion back in the day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZPCjQSoEUg

I would say it's a bit of a false equivalency. Music is most often sold as a collection of smaller works. I've never bought an album expecting to love or even like every track on it, but unlike most other media, you usually don't need to listen to the whole thing to fully appreciate each part. Something longer with a sense of continuity from one part to the next and no way to skip the less exciting bits needs to be good from beginning to end. And I do at least expect my albums to play smoothly all the way through, which this apparently does not.

I'm trying to think of a bigger douche bag than Randy Pitchford. Nobody else is coming to mind...

He's an idiot but it's the equivalent of telling a kid "hey even Michael Jordan had some bad b-ball games." I didn't think he was doing a hard comparison to the Beatles, idk, the replies seem to be beside his (idiotic) point

Really? I have heard of the Beatles.

I had no idea the grease lord had somehow gotten ahold of Risk of Rain 2 and it’s appealing what they’ve done to it.

Everything the Beatles did were hits, massive hits even. Even their more polarizing content was still a bigger hit than the average artists of their time.

I can think of some big gaming companies, but almost none would I say are in the realms of Beatles popularity or success. Just being objective here, cos while I do like and respect the Beatles, I have quite a few musical artists I like better. This was a hot take comparison for sure.

The one nice thing I can say about Randy is that he is borderline unshakeable. Miss after miss and the negativity/criticism just slides off him like water off a ducks back- for the most part. Willingly staying on Twitter after the last several weeks is a bold move, or he really enjoys the responses.

That's about where my niceties end. Greasy...

@Anachronism

I don't think he's trying to make an argument that people don't appreciate his bad games or that you need to take the good with the bad. He's saying he's okay with 25% of his games being garbage and no one liking or buying them, because 75% is a respectable hit rate.

@BodkinDQ If you go by output, or even just how one company has changed the industry, the two likely candidates to be the Beatles of gaming are Nintendo (no surprise), or Valve. (Their contributions while lesser today were cataclysmic through the GoldSrc and Source eras.)

@BodkinDQ

https://youtu.be/SNdcFPjGsm8

That was on an album. People expecting ballads like "I want to hold your hand" bought it and got that instead. It did not go over well.

Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine were seen as flops at the time. "Let It Be" had strong initial sales but was panned by critics and fans, and flopped pretty hard. "Beatles for Sale", released at the hight of Beatlemania, saw sales most bands would kill for but underperformed based on expectations and most people didn't care for it.

The idea that everything the Beatles touched turned to gold is revisionist history. They had a lot of flops. They have a whole period, the "Psychedelic Era" where most music historians' will argue they were consistently bad, with every album released in that time disappointed both critically and commercially. Today it's considered one of the most important contributions any pop band has ever made to music, but that doesn't change how it was received at the time, and "important" doesn't always mean "good".

They have 60 years of curation and sales on their side, so it's easy to ignore the bad. But it absolutely happened. I think it would be hard to argue that Revolution 9 is a better song then Borderlands was as movie.

Guy couldn't even bothered to compare themselves to "Oasis" while everyone is talking about the new reunion tour? He's trash.

https://www.nme.com/news/music/noel-gallagher-on-how-embarrassing-it-was-for-oasis-to-be-compared-to-the-beatles-3097649

What do you mean this man isn't rotting in jail? What do you mean he hasn't faced proper consequence and is still making games? What do you mean someone like him still has legal access to social media or the internet in general?

The Beatles do get idolized too much. The point the guy was making was franchise that makes a lot of money has some misses/slumps. Folks can stop clutching their pearls now.

Randy Pitchfork and Concord are one and the same

@HeadPirate Okay, wow. Songs like "Helter Skelter" was obviously misinterpreted and controversial, but I stand by my original statement. I mean, a game like Pokemon S/V are extremely controversial and haven't went over well with a lot of their fans. Still sold like crazy. Same goes for the Beatles. I'm not going over objectively good or bad, I'm talking sales and commercialism. Even their lesser content shall we say, still managed to sell even if only because of their name being on it.

Again, I'm not a Beatles ride or die fan here. There are quite a few more bands/artists I prefer, but still to compare oneself to the Beatles seems kinda pretentious. I understand his sentiment, I do, but that's a high bar in commercialism/popularity. Agree to disagree~

@BodkinDQ

He's not comparing himself to the Beatles, he's making an accurate comment about a historical fact. He says that not every Beatles song was a success at the time. Yes. That true. Some where flat out awful and people hated them. 25% is subjective, but clearly just rhetorical. He means "some".

He also brings up another completely accurate factual statement by saying sometimes he makes makes bad games, but that's not going to stop him from continuing to try and make good games.

Nowhere does he compare his work to the Beatles. Nowhere dose he suggest he's objectively as good as the Beatles.

He just saying the fact that the Beatles sometimes failed helps him power through his own failures, because they did alright. That's a great world view.

I'm kinda old. I switched to a much more creative outlet late in my life. When people told me I was too old to start out, I would bring up how Grandma Moses started painting at 78. I'm not saying I'm as good as Grandma Moses. I don't even paint. I'm just sharing some wisdom that should be uplifting and inspiring that helps me deal with my own situation. I'm drawing a parallel between one aspect (I'm old, she was old) because the conversation is about how I'm too old. He's drawing a parallel between on aspect (he fails sometimes, they failed sometimes) because the conversation is about why he should quit because he had a big flop.

The people saying he's comparing himself to the Beatles are just looking for an excuse to shout at something they don't like. And I mean ... fair. He's an awful human being. But that's still what they are doing, and we should probably be aware and call people out when they try and foster anger and outrage from a benign statement. Because like ... that happens a lot.

They’ve developed like 3 games. 989 Studios has more clout.

@HeadPirate Thanks for being the most level headed out the majority of these comments so far.

People need to settle down, Jesus. Flipping out over a comment on Twitter is exactly the reason why I avoid it like the plague.

@Quiet2down

Thanks for the shoutout. It really means a lot to me. I'll keep trying to always be that.

@HeadPirate And my point is that you can't compare AAA games to individual songs. In the best case, a pop song can be written and recorded in a day by a single person. Obviously your average superstar will have a bunch of audio engineers, marketing teams, producers, etc. involved too, but it's still nowhere close to hundreds of people working 8+ hours a day for years like you can expect from a big budget game. And also unlike games, you can still make a profit off some mediocre songs by tossing them in an album with a few hits. One big budget flop can be enough to kill a mid-size game studio. Even if a bad game manages to profit off pure brand recognition, it will still damage that brand and consequently damage the sales of future games.

@Anachronism

Sure. I don't see anything in your comment that's contraveral. I mean I'm a Marxist and I couldn't agree more with that last part, comrade. Failure is a privilege that the bourgeoisie take for granted. For the proletariat, failure is destitution, starvation, and death! This is just another way our oppressors try and blame the reality of class discrepancy on the oppressed. If your not successful it's because you're not willing to take risks. You're just not good enough, it's not that for you the price of failure is much higher. It's no different then when they say the parasite's struggles are of their own making, because they started their company from "nothing", gaslighting us in to believing that using only a small bit of your available capital with no risk is the same as staking your very life and the life of your family on a venture with no fallback. We shouldn't stand for it. Unite!

Sadly, it's not what's being discussed. Check out post 31.

(edit: because someone asked nicely I ended up doing the math. It's in post 44)

He's got nothing on the cringe & ego in this comment box. Homeboy really needs to step up his game. Should have picked a better band anyway, I'd be down to actually buy some Gearbox garbage if he was comparing themselves to Motorhead or Merycful Fate.

This guy knows he made a massive flop but rejects anykind failure because of his ego, so he'll say anything exaggerated for publicity sake.

The best thing any sane person is to do is to ignore this troll.

Agree to disagree~

Humourless Beatles fans? Say it ain’t so!

@HeadPirate Hi I'm sorry but I'm a little confused by some of your comments, if you wouldn't mind discussing a little more about it. Pitchford claimed "25% hit-rate" which means missing 75%, right? I think the point of contention here wasn't that he compared himself to The Beatles (perhaps it was for some people), but rather how incorrect the statement was. I personally don't know how popular Gearbox's ventures are or even what they consider successful, but it seemed he was alluding to only having "hits" (games) around 25% of the time, with his very incorrect reference he made. Am I missing something? Sorry if I'm misunderstanding

“And fans aren’t happy” could be added to quite a lot of news headlines.

But in this case, it does seem appropriate.

@babybilly

Don't apologize, communication is a two way street. In fact, good on you for asking for clarification.

Honestly, I considered that a moot point. It's rhetorical mostly, I take it to just mean "some". For the rhetorical device to work, you pick the example you think is the BEST as something to illustrate the best still fails sometimes. I picked Grandma Moses because she's the oldest example I could think of. Randy prefaces that by saying the Beatles are the best musically group of all time, so that would mean Randy thinks the best possible hit rate of released content is 25%.

(looks at watch)

Ok, seeing I really respect how you asked that question and I've got some time ... let's do this. I'm actually pretty curious now myself.

The Beatles released 230-240 songs, if you count releases up to and including Let It Be. Let's say 235. The variance is based on how you count different versions of the same songs and singles that didn't see a re-release. Next we need to quantify what "hit rate" means, which is a little harder.

55 charted in the UK and 71 charted in the US. So if we use that, Randy is spot on. 24% hit" in the UK, 30% "hit" in the US. Given it's the Beatles, I would think the UK number is the one you would use. And given this basically lines up exactly with the number he gave, I'm going to say that's the math he did (or had his underpaid assistant do) before posting. And it checks.

That's good enough for science, but not Pirate science!

Let's look at the idea that a song is a "hit" if it stands the test of time, and a miss if it ends up forgotten.

I can get the top 100 songs from most streaming platforms. Nielsen and Gallup have some public data on songs people recognize, generally limited to top 25 or top 100. Spotify is a gold mine, with weekly top 100 charts I can mine for about 5 years. On all these sources I can only find around 27 unique Beatles songs. That's great. Few bands do better. But it's not looking good for the idea that a large number of Beatles songs are still in the zeitgeist.

I can also pull data on re-releases, and this is pretty telling. Including only Albums that sold over 100,000 units (I didn't pick that, that's just the range of my data set), from 2000 to now, we only see 64 unique songs. Steaming is hard to quantify because their are tons of repeats and live albums, but a quick sampling of 50 songs showed nothing that wasn't already captured. That means that when people talk about "The Beatles", it unlikely that anyone other then super fans have been exposed to more then 64 songs, or 27% of their total catalog. You would have to get used CDs or invest in box sets that cost $100s to hear anything else. You can find most of their songs on YouTube, but your song didn't "hit" if people have to go looking for it for it by name.

So ... yeah. He's like ... dead on. If I was to guess at what's tripping people up, it's how huge their catalog is. Freaking Abba only have 112 songs. So our brains are counting the number of Beatles songs we think are hits, coming up with a number like 60, and thinking that MUST be bigger then 25%, base on the number of songs we think bands usually release.

God I love research. Science is so often counter intuitive, you can never trust your gut and have to just follow the numbers. I thought he was lowballing it as well, but it looks like it's easy to determine his mythology and it actually checks out.

@HeadPirate Huh, that's pretty interesting. I admit I do like number crunching.
Well, to that, I'd say the claim makes far more sense. I think when I read the article I was under the assumption Pitchford was referring to singles, the songs The Beatles "put out there", as it were. But if we're talking entire catalog, then that is a much better analogy at least in that sense. Hmm I think this is taking my brain into the discussion of whether he meant a financially successful thing or a universally-liked thing. Plus it's hard to feel the equivalency of the work for one song to an entire modern video game. Meh, anyway. Thanks for the reply and clarification!

@babybilly

You too. I thoroughly enjoyed that exercise.

Honestly i agree with the philosophy of making art make it because you love it for people who will get it not for the masses and not for profit...even tho i don't like borderlands personally

@Purgatorium pshhh never in anyones life brotha

I think it's better for him if he delete his twitter and never speak on it again. Better to remain silent and be though a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt 😅

All he had to do is to remain silent, or at least say short sentence like "we will fix the dlc asap", that's it.

Ignoring Borderlands 3 and Tiny Tina, Gearbox more or less had only failures the last 12-15 years.

Gearbox is the horrible company that bought Risk of Rain and made the terrible DLC for 2 that was released now. There's something wrong with the CEO of this company.