Randy! Come on!

This deal's getting worse all the time!

Yeah, no Resident Evil 1 this week. Can you blame me? RE3 is taking up all of my spare gaming time and I just cannot bring myself to return back to old school Jill just yet. Otherwise I might start psyching myself out by asking pertinent question like why Ms. Valentine suddenly looks like a Russian Supermodel a few months after Arklay? (Is that what being suspended for two months does for you?) But I promise that this won't be another two month hiatus and I'll be hitting the RE1 blogs sooner than you think. And with a revengence. (Yes, spellcheck, that is a word.) But none of that is relevant today as for this Sunday I wanted to look into a little peculiar situation involving a fellow who just cannot manage to keep his little snout out of the headlines for one full year. (Seriously, what is up with this guy?) And that special little individual would be one; Randall Pitchford.

Now I would never say anything explicitly mean about Randy, and that is in no way because I just found out that his father used to work for the NSA, (Is that real? I'm going to continue operating under the assumption that it is.) but I can't help but point and laugh when some situation unfurls in the gaming world that has his name on it. It's just such a novelty for one of the most reoccurring 'point-and-laugh' icons in the industry to be a literal CEO. I mean there'll always be the odd CEO who makes odd foot-in-mouth comments every now and then, but Randy puts them all to shame with his shenanigans. It's to the point where I'd wager that Pitchford is more well known for his many mistakes than he is for the great games that his team pushes out, and they do make great games. During his tenure as CEO of Gearbox (which was since it's inception as he is a co-founder) Gearbox has put out the Borderlands games, The Brothers in Arms titles, The re-released Homeworld games (Okay, that was as a publisher but still) and... Aliens Colonial Marines? Okay, look there are some gems in their catalogue and theirs is clearly a company of some talent; it's just a shame that all that comes at the cost of having such an... outspoken lead man.

What makes this just baffling from the perspective of a casual viewer is the way how the public comes into contact with the sort of information you'd expect to wrangle up in a complicated case of investigative reporting, just by looking at the news. Randy's many alleged indiscretions somehow manage to make news with worrying regularity to the point where even a hardcore Randy-stan would have to concede to the age old adage of "Where there's smoke..." Take the whole situation over Alien Colonial Marines, for example. SEGA commissioned Gearbox to work on that title and it famously came out as such a buggy, ill-conceived mess that one of the core AI mechanics was completely borked due to a single easily fixable typo in some command files. (That's just a whole new level of not given any craps.) Now for any other game that would have been the end of the story; promising games coming out as trash happens all the time in the gaming world, but somehow that isn't where matters ended.

You see, not too long after that whole scenario there, arose accusations that the Aliens game wasn't afforded the proper resources that it was due from Gearbox. More to the point, that somewhere along the line the decision was made to funnel the money that SEGA had provided away from Aliens and towards their development of Borderlands 2, a much more promising venture for the Gearbox team. Now those are some huge accusations that are far outside of the usual news you hear in the gaming world, but somehow the mere fact of Randy's potential involvement in this alleged fraud (am I using my 'speculatives' enough?) cursed this story to leak into the public into a PR nightmare. (Needless to say, Gearbox hasn't received a great many licencing deals over the past 8 or so years.)

Indeed, when it comes down to it, money appears to be Randy's inevitable downfall. Afterall, we also have the wildly circulated story about Randy pocketing some bonuses that were originally intended for his staff (Which I believe has been legally dropped so take of that what you will), the tale of him stiffing David Eddings out of royalties and assaulting him outside a hotel, (those are unrelated incidents, by-the-by) and then the story about him losing an unprotected memory stick at an Medieval Times restaurant which contained various sensitive materials important not only to Gearbox but Sony and Microsoft. (That one isn't so inherently linked to money but I'd imagine it resulted in a hit to the stocks, so that's lost potential revenue.) Also, for some bizarre reason he decided to not only keep sensitive work materials on that but also some... 'sensitive in another manner' materials... how do you say... He had porn on the stick, okay! And note that I don't use 'Allegedly' for that claim because, bizarrely, that is one that he has actually admitted to, whilst detailing exactly what kind of porn is was. (TMI, my man.)

So what could old Randy have gotten into this time that drags his name through the mud once more? Has he made some overzealous claims about the marketing of his games only to devolve into a childish tantrum when he got called out? No, that was last year. How about conduct a tone-deaf interview Pete Hines style, where he embarrasses himself and tries to shame all those foolish enough not to love his crappy Aliens game? Again, No. That was quite a few years back. No, this time he has decided to revise the amount of bonuses that staff will be receiving for completing Borderlands 3 and helping it become the biggest Gearbox game of all time; several months after said staff have already shipped said game. Basically the corporate equivalent of dangling a carrot on a stick in front of your mule until it's finished churning all the grain in the mill before eating the carrot right in front of it. (There's an image.)

As I understand it (which could be wrong) in previous years the way that Gearbox has handled bonuses is in a manner that I'd call quite generous, in that they have a revenue sharing system wherein the success of the game directly correlates to the size of the bonus check. Different staff get different bonus rates according to a gradient of how essential their work was considered to the project, but overall this is a great way to get everyone invested in performing the best the possibly can. Although specifics weren't shared, (or at least I don't care to go looking) some folk claim that the program is so generous that after the run away success of Borderlands 2, some staff were able to go out and buy a house. (Now that's the kind of bonus that folk like me could only dream of.)

In recent years, however, Gearbox haven't had any titles that hit as strong as Borderlands 2 did and they've even put out a few flops. Now staff are still getting paid of course, but a lot of them were dreaming of the days when they could pull off a Borderlands again. So once Three started breaking sales records and eclipsing Borderlands 2, you can imagine how excited folks started getting. But as I've already disclosed, things wouldn't be quite so clear cut this time around as Gearbox management decided to Darth Vader everyone with a "I'm altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further", effectively kiboshing a great many holidays that staff may have planned for. (Where would they go anyway, to be fair, we are in the middle of a global lockdown.)

In defence of themselves, Gearbox did rattle through a list of excuses to why this is completely okay and no one should be upset. Most prominent of these excuses was the fact that Borderlands 3 ended up incurring a lot more expenses than was originally expected and that the Gearbox family has expanded significantly since the good old days of BL2; basically arguing that there's more mouths to feed so everyone gets less. Now these are valid points on their own but they both disregard a very important fact; this decision was made literally one week ago whilst the main Borderlands 3 game wrapped production last year, Gearbox made sure to keep their workforce grinding away for the promise of a big payday only to reap the rewards of their hard work and without paying it off in kind.

Now all of this sounds like the kind of situation that's best hashed out between Gearbox and it's staff, although it paints a dour picture for the rest of the industry when such duplicitous ruses get pulled by a AAA studio like this. There are certainly lessons to learn here and I'm curious how that will manifest with the people willing to heed them. Oh, and if you're still sitting there stretching your head and wondering what exactly our main man Randy has to do in all this; we're not sure, his influence in this decision is yet to be determined. That being said, he did manage to insert himself into this story by apparently telling staff that they're welcome to quit because of this situation. (Wow, in the middle of a pandemic which is threatening to ravage the world's economy? real classy, Randy...) You know they say it's in times of great crisis that one gets to see the real fibre of those around them, and I'm certainly curious to see if such revelations have the potential to come back and bite these sorts of folks in the nether's once all this is over and done with...