Borderlands 4 was announced recently and they had an event around it at PAX. One of the things they mentioned was that they keep an eye on the discussions regarding the earlier games online. While various content creators were happy about this, I feel it’s a mistake.

Okay, “mistake” is too strong, but it is hazardous.

Think about it this way: Who talks about the games online? The people really, really interested and invested in them. Like say, Joltzdude139, Ki11er Six and moxsy. They are all quite vocal about the games and active in the community around them. So, one might say their opinions are important.

Sure, they are important… to an extent. They are probably the most important single players of the games. However, Joltzdude139 has about three quarters of a million subscribers on YouTube. Ki11er Six has over half a million. Moxsy has over 400 thousand. Those are pretty good numbers, but considering that Borderlands 3 has sold 18 million copies, we can surmise that only a very small percentage of all players are as invested in the game as these content creators, especially considering that those three creators probably have plenty of overlap within their subscribers.

So, the problem with following online discussion without a critical look is that you might end up placating the wrong people. People who play a game for a long period of time are not making more money for the developer than the guy who bought it, played it for a few hours and got bored with it (not exactly true because of DLCs, but you get the point).

The content creators need something they can make content on for years on end. They need various challenges they can take on and a huge number of potential builds to play around with. Whereas based on Steam achievement data, only less than third of all BL2 players and little over third of all BL3 players have ever even finished the game. Sure, things like free weekends can mess with this data, but it would still seem like most of the people who try the game don’t finish it.

Isn’t that the group you should pay attention to? What is it that makes them quit the game they have potentially paid quite a bit of money and invested time on? You won’t figure that out by listening to the online discussion, because in general they remain the silent majority and they are very unlikely to buy the next game. You would like to keep them as returning customers.

On the other hand, that figure of only third of all players finishing a game is not uncommon, but the percentage is still smaller than that of many other games.