Borderlands 3 rockets up Steam’s best-sellers chart to its highest concurrent player counts all year after the Borderlands movie’s launch

An unintended side-effect

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The Borderlands movie might have been a massive flop, butGearbox’s games are having a lovely resurgence in the aftermath of the movie’s underwhelming launch.

The Borderlands movie just launched last week, and - spoiler alert - it’s not great. OurBorderlands reviewlambasted it as “a frenetic and disorderly shambles gamers are likely to loathe,” granting it just two stars. Other critics didn’t love it either - at one point theBorderlands movie held an astounding 0% approval ratingon Rotten Tomatoes from critics.

Despite this stinker, it’s not all bad news for Gearbox, developer of the Borderlands games. It turns out that the looter shooter series is having a bit of resurgence on Steam in the wake of the Borderlands movie, and I can only guess it’s because moviegoers wanted to see if the series offered anything worthwhile after Eli Roth’s adaptation.

According toSteamDBfor example, Borderlands 3 just hit a peak Steam concurrent player count of 12,379, its highest peak concurrent player count since February 2023. Additionally,SteamDBhas Borderlands 2 rising to 7,938 peak Steam players over the last few days, the shooter’s highest peak concurrent player count since February 2021.

If you head over to theSteam top-sellers chart, you can see Borderlands 3 is currently outselling the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3 and God of War, and while Borderlands 2 is significantly further down the chart, it’s still outselling hits like Stardew Valley, Rainbow Six Siege, and Gearbox’s own Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. It probably helps that both games are hugely discounted - Borderlands 3 with 90% off, and Borderlands 2 with 75% off.

It’s a weirdly good time to get into Borderlands 3 - or to return to the shooter if you’re a veteran player. A new update last week added the ability forplayers to skip right to the very end of the game, provided they’ve already got a max level character - so you can basically go right to Borderlands 3’s endgame with a different character.

Here are 39 of the biggestBorderlands movie Easter eggsand game references.

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Hirun Cryer is a freelance reporter and writer with Gamesradar+ based out of U.K. After earning a degree in American History specializing in journalism, cinema, literature, and history, he stepped into the games writing world, with a focus on shooters, indie games, and RPGs, and has since been the recipient of the MCV 30 Under 30 award for 2021. In his spare time he freelances with other outlets around the industry, practices Japanese, and enjoys contemporary manga and anime.

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