Borderlands 4 has not seen a very productive few months. The game launched to fairly high player counts of just over 300,000 on Steam. A fairly grand feat, considering previous entries in the series have never topped that on Steam. A few months later, the player count came crashing down to a mere fraction of what it once was. Now, there aren’t many players hopping onto the game on PC. Not even the latest DLC for Borderlands 4, How Rush Saved Mercenary Day, helped, and it was given away for free.
Borderlands 4 Player Count Remains Low After Content Update
Multiple factors contributed to the Borderlands 4 player count dropping as fast as it did. For instance, the bug-riddled launch on PC didn’t make players want to stick around. It quickly got annoying when the game would consistently crash, you’d lose gear, or enemies would get stuck outside the map. Of course, much of this has been fixed with time, but that first impression matters to a lot of gamers when choosing what game to pick up.
Another major issue is replayability. Gearbox included the ability to jump back into the game starting at level 30, making the grind to max out the four characters a bit easier. This ultimately feels like more of a slog, mainly due to the need to rediscover the entirety of the map with each character, and replaying the entire game isn’t as fun as players would want it to be.
This is a long way of saying that it only took two months for over 90% of the player base on Steam to jump ship and stop playing Borderlands 4. Now, the player count on Steam, according to SteamDB, is seeing peaks of 10,225 – even less than what we said at the start of the month.
It is unclear whether Gearbox and 2K released the first Bounty Pack DLC for Borderlands 4 for free as a means of making up for the lackluster seasonal event, or whether they did it to make up for the poor loot grind in the endgame, but not even a free DLC pack has managed to move the needle when it comes to player count. Typically, a DLC brings in a spike of players, but the How Rush Saved Mercenary Day DLC only raised the player count by a small fraction. This fraction is possibly around 1,000 players, as the week before the DLC saw player count highs of 15,000, and a peak of 16,000 happened shortly after the DLC was released.
This player count, which peaked on November 23, quickly dropped to 10,000 on November 25. This doesn’t bode well for the future of Borderlands 4, as it appears that the franchise many once loved is continuing its downward trend that started with Borderlands 3. Of course, the first major DLC for Borderlands 4 is coming in the first quarter of 2026, along with another Bounty Pack DLC. Additionally, players will have access to the first Invincible Boss by the end of the year. Of course, it has yet to be seen how much this will move the needle.
