The company will not meet the expectations its workers expected despite the game’s success.

It is no secret that Gearbox workers have a comparatively lower salary than other major video game industry studios. It is an unusual model, but the company compensates this situation with a series of bonuses that come from the distribution of profits harvested for each game they develop: 60% of the total goes to the company, and the remaining 40% is distributed among the developers. Considering the success of the terrific Borderlands 3, it was to be expected that these bonuses would be much more generous than they will actually end up being. All this made Borderlands 3 developers unhappy.

According to a group of workers interviewed anonymously by Kotaku, company president Randy Pitchford reported earlier in the week that Borderlands 3 has turned out to be a particularly expensive game to produce, which is why the five and six-figure bonuses that they had been promised to be “significantly lower”. How much? That depends on several factors, such as the veteran of each employee which makes overall Borderlands 3 developers unhappy.

Well-known journalist Jason Schreier finds out that factors such as the transition from the Unreal Engine 3 to the Unreal Engine 4 mid-development, mismatches in sales expectations, the substantial growth of the Workforce or even the need to reevaluate production costs by adding the development of DLC have forced the studio’s top leadership to reduce the value of these bonds.

Of course, the Gearbox model is risky. The weakest games in terms of sales, like Aliens: Colonial Marines or Battleborn, did the team no favours, although occasional hits like Borderlands 2 were so celebrated that some employees were able to buy houses with these bonuses. The original Kotaku article reflects that this disappointing news will frustrate many individuals’ future plans, and many of them are likely to leave the company soon.

Borderlands 3 was able to boast of million-dollar sales shortly after its launch, although in February we learned that publisher Take-Two had gone public after announcing fairly poor fiscal results. For his part, Randy Pitchford was involved a few months ago in a rugged legal dispute that came, in part, from a self-awarded millionaire bond.

You can read our Borderlands 3 review here.

Source: Kotaku