Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford said that the Epic Games Store will kill Steam five years ago. Now the internet mocks him as Borderlands 4 crawls back.

Honestly? You'd almost feel sorry for Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford. He's been posting through the Epic Games Store after the Borderlands movie failed and burned, and now everyone is making fun of him because he made a bad prediction five years ago. That the Epic Games Store resources and willingness to spend them would make Steam look like a "dying" store by now.

Then, Borderlands crawled back to Steam. Borderlands 4 was announced at the Gamescom Opening Night Live event last night, five years after Borderlands 3 became an exclusive Epic Games Store product. It's coming back to Epic, but this time it's not an exclusive. Steam will have the game available on day one if it's your preferred store.

Pitchford's tweetstorm from 2019 about the Epic Store's bright future compared to Steam was rediscovered by the internet. Pitchford wrote in April that year that "from a track-record point of view, I expect that Epic's investments in technology will outpace Valve substantially." "When we look at Steam in five or 10 years, it might look like a dying shop and other, competing stores, will be where to be." He wrote a little later that "if I bet on it (and remember, I've got an excellent seat with a good view of this competition), Epic is going to surpass Valve in terms of features and service."

Which, ah... hasn't quite been borne out over the last half-decade. Steam is perhaps more dominant than ever and the internet at large is--for reasons both reasonable and unreasonable--intensely hostile to the idea of switching their storefront of choice from Steam to Epic (or any other launcher).

Many posts mocking Pitchford's predictions have pointed this out. One Reddit commenter was amused by the name "Randy "Nostradamus" Pitchford." "It could happen any minute now!" Another user wrote. "If Randy says that my name is something else, I would double-check my birth certificate," wrote a user by the name of ares0027. This sums up the general tone of the internet's response to Pitchford’s unearthed prediction.

Some have made fun of Steam's (perceived), inactive nature, and the Epic Games Store for its relative lack of features. "Just [interested] what technology Epic invested in over these] last [years]?" One user wrote, "Introducing "Shopping Cart"(r )"--now, you can pay for multiple items at once, truly revolutionary technology!" The EGS was launched without the option to add more than one game to your basket.

Extreme_Isopod_9414 wrote: "It's as if other stores are actively attempting to be so fucking worst than Steam." Others replied that Valve doesn't need to do much to beat the competition. A user named NJ_Legion_Iced_Tea called this strategy "Sun Tsu’s art of not be a fucking fool."

You get the picture. To be fair to Pitchford he made this prediction just a few months after the EGS was launched in late 2018. Valve was only just beginning to consider innovative projects like the Steam Deck, and no one knew that Epic's strategy would be more about giving away free games and purchasing exclusive rights than making interesting technical investments. It doesn't take a genius, however, to predict that Steam would not become a "dying" store in just five years. At least a certain of this mockery feels a little deserved.