Manywhelps: Well you're not wrong. We will be compared to the best in the industry, but the public has been doing that (specifically with Bioshock) since we announced. I'm not sure much has changed. We are the ones that made the Don't Starve comparisons, not the public :) Expectations are always a pain in the ass. But I am confident that the game is different enough that people will consider $60 money well spent. Not everyone, but there are people who don't believe $60 is reasonable for any game, and that I can't do anything about.

I've explained the price rise now rather than waiting many times - we have to have consistent pricing across stores, specifically between retail and digital. Even if we didn't, raising the price only on 1.0 means most people would pre-buy at 50% off in the weeks leading up to launch. That isn't reasonable leading into a game release and significantly undercuts the value of your game. The race to the bottom on game pricing is already a major issue faced by the industry and we wouldn't want to contribute to it.

Manywhelps: Yeah, so that video has some interesting points, but it's also a bit misleading about certain things. We've reached out to them to talk but, sadly, so far they appear to be more interested in generating controversy than actually talking about the issues raised. Very disappointing, because 130,000 people are now less well informed as a result.

We're going to respond in detail, and explain why I think that.

That being said, I can respond to your concerns here and now. At least I'll have the chance to clear the air. So fire away, and I'll do what I can to answer.

Manywhelps: 1) Gearbox is helping with QA and some user research, otherwise everything they do is on the marketing side.

2) Because they've been pretty good with us, actually. Their publishing team is separate from their development team, and frankly, the internet loves to get angry at Gearbox but I don't think they really deserve it. Aliens Colonial Marines was a bad game. It happens. It sucks, but it doesn't mean the people at Gearbox are bad people. Balance that against the good work Gearbox has done (and against how much people want Borderlands 3)... I don't know, I just don't think they're the devil people make them out to be.

Manywhelps: The Collector's Box doesn't, no. We didn't call it a Collector's Edition, it was supposed to be a box of cool stuff that people could buy (including people who bought digitally). In the end we're going to rename it because people keep associating it with a Collector's Edition, which was kind of the opposite of what we wanted.

It was my decision not to ship the game with it, Gearbox explained the options and I made the call. Adding a game and calling it a collector's edition would have increased the price by >$60 (partly due to the cost of the game and partly due to having to create and ship additional versions of the box). More and more studios are shipping Collector type things without the game (for reasons I unfortunately can't get into), and we based this off the Injustice 2 and Mass Effect Andromeda versions.