Randy Pitchford Of Battleborn's Gearbox Talks Success And Failure

In an interview with Glixel, Randy Pitchford of Gearbox Software talks about what success and failure means in the gaming industry, a highly interesting read. And, he touches on Battleborn, it's inevitable comparisons to Overwatch, and the vision that guided the character-shooter's development.

If you think about new IP at the blockbuster scale, there's just two. It's Overwatch and Battleborn. They're both the hero shooter. They're both that same pitch.

Pitchford explains how Blizzard's entry to the character-shooter genre fostered a bit of anxiety.

It's kind of a bad strategy to try to be the best of a thing. The better strategy is to be the only people that do the thing. The wisdom of that is when you're the only people that do the thing, so you can really only be compared against yourself. But once Blizzard showed up, well, that jig is up.

But Pitchford conclude's his retelling of the months leading up to Battleborn's release with the reassuring notion that Battleborn's return on investments was "fine." And he offers an insightful measurement of success:

Sometimes we'll have things that we think are failures and the outside world looks at it as a success and sometimes we have things that we think are successes and the outside world might look at it as a failure.

The interview is well worth reading and delves into Pitchford's legacy in the gaming industry, from his early days working on Duke Nukem 3D to today.