Updated: SEGA employee takes to Reddit, says SEGA’s money funded the Borderlands franchise

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EDIT: Aki-at has corrected us, the employee on reddit worked at SEGA, not Gearbox. Though what he says sounds about the same as the Gearbox employee that took to Reddit a few days ago. 

We had a post a few days ago about a Gearbox Worker spilling his guts on the development of Aliens: Colonial Marines. Now we have another one and this time, he is verified. Meaning he sent proper verification that he works at Gearbox Software to the moderators. So what did he say that was interesting?

“Gearbox didnt care about the game, they spent the money from acm on the borderlands games. Look at the release of borderlands and when aliens was anounced, they had the other companies like timegate do the work. When they got the game back timegate had done a terrible job. When it came into sega it was shit basicaly. Gearbox only cared about fixing ‘progression blockers’ (things that stop a player from getting through a level) or crashes” – soetester

The first and easiest is that all that money SEGA pumped through them was actually used to develop Borderlands. Do I see a lawsuit coming? Well, I think something happen since if you go to the Reddit page, his account was deleted. No worries, screenshot of his answers after the break.

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34 responses to “Updated: SEGA employee takes to Reddit, says SEGA’s money funded the Borderlands franchise

  1. pso2love says:

    Yeah, I would like to see SEGA get their money back.

  2. CrazyTails says:

    Alright now i’m startign to get pissed off at them. How much I like borderlands, this just aint right

  3. Aki-at says:

    SEGA poured around $60 mil according to this guy, who has been verified as who he says he is.

    That’s basically…

    Buys you 6 Yakuza 1/2s
    4 Valkyria Chronicles/Sonic Unleasheds
    3 Yakuza 3/4s
    And almost one Shenmue!

    (Yes I know Yu Suzuki corrected the budget of Shenmue 1/2 to about $35 mil, but you get the idea!)

  4. Nux says:

    Screw getting the money back. I would like to see SEGA get the rights to the Borderlands franchise. That’s a SEGA GAME now, as far as I’m concerned.

  5. Shigs says:

    Wow. Racist much? How is it a “jew” practice to obtain an IP you fucking payed for?!

  6. Nux says:

    Judaism is an ethnicity and a religion, not a race ;).

    Anyway, yes, horribly offensive comment from grade A asshole removed. Please don’t post something like that again.

  7. I read that whole big ass giant picture. In one comment, he mentions that there will be “legal ramifications.” In another he mentions how amazing the new Aliens game looks and runs on the next gen console devkits, and that is being made by Creative Assembly.
    Since GearBox most likely used Sega money, I believe Sega should use for not only the obvious “loss of potential profits” (I was going to buy the game) but also for back profits owed for being an unknown Borderlands producer.

  8. Skateboard says:

    If that’s true then I am really angry at SEGA West! So much money lost and a huge damage done! And the best part: SEGA West doesn’t localise high quality SEGA Japan titles like Valkyria Chronicles 3 but pumps 60mil. $ over the years into a bad joke like this? And carelessly trust Gearbox without noticing what direction it is taking? Something is seriously wrong with the management of SEGA West. They have to draw the consequences and get the responsible people immediately fired!

    • Eck says:

      There ALWAYS seems to be something seriously wrong with Sega’s marketing, and someone ALWAYS seems to be at fault but never has a face or name, it’s ALWAYS just Sega.
      What the hell is wrong with the company? Who knows, but at times, it’s been suggested that people within just want them to fail, even when the Dreamcast came, some people, a particular segment of the populous who can’t be labeled accurately into a box, ALWAYS wanted Sega to fail, and were always extremely skeptical of them, always assuming the worst.
      At times, SEGA is practically the INTJ of the Videogaming industry but also seemingly wrongly labeled as disabled along with it, a common misunderstanding.
      What ever it is, there right enough is something not right within the company, they are smart enough but do dumb stuff like this far too often for it to be just a coincidence.

  9. Fairgamer 10 says:

    And here I thought that the next set of games I would play through are borderlands 1 & 2. I dont know about you, but I am boycotting Gearbox.

  10. Archon says:

    If Gearbox embezzled money then I hope SEGA is able to get justice.

  11. Betablocker says:

    4 years after his dismissal, the course off Simon Jeffery continues.

  12. Debonair says:

    SEGA should sue the absolute bloody fuck out of these dirty Gearbox bastards!!
    They’ve ruined the Sega brand name yet again, these low, worthless cheap third party companies with easy cash in licenses, I wouldn’t be surprised if the reason Sega’s name has been affected by cheap, crap licenses is because of total cunts like Gearbox taking the lone of them. Sega should stop financing total fuck wits like Gear box and go back to financing their in-house development studios, Sega nearly always had top quality produce within them.

    • Eli says:

      Man, Sega had the greatest in house development studios during the Dreamcast days. A lot of my favorite video games are from that era, and are Sega produced/developed. Even though VisualConcepts wasn’t truly a first party team, Sega bought them and pretty much knocked EA off it’s high horse…and nearly won king of football games if it wasn’t for the big wallet of EA.

  13. inthesky says:

    Whoa.

    This is turning out worse than I expected.

  14. ryo says:

    “And almost one Shenmue!”

    Sandbox games aren’t that expensive in 2013. In fact, almost every modern game in this era has some kind of open world experience.
    Just imagine if they took all this money and invested on Shenmue III, I’m 200% sure yu suzuki wouldn’t put this money aside to make another game.

  15. ryo says:

    SEGA allowed this product to be sold. They’re partners in crime with Gearbox, if there’s anyone that should sue something is whoever wasted their hard money on this broken piece of trash.
    This company needs look in the mirror first and ask “why the fuck do we keep fucking ourselves in the ass, time after time”

  16. CalmDownGenius says:

    It’s not a matter of SEGA “allowing” it to be sold. They invested 60 million dollars and 6 years of their time and damned near had to sue Gearbox to get them to even work on the game.

    Hopefully it can be verified that Gearbox did use SEGA’s money to instead work on Borderlands franchise games and DLC so GBX can be held accountable.

    • ryo says:

      That’s not only proof of bad management by SEGA, but it’s also lack of character by the company.
      If they wanted to sue gearbox over this then by giving the seal of approval on the cover for a few cheap bucks, they lose all their credibility on the case.

      “Well… we kinda think they stole our money because the game sucks but we also think it’s good enough to be released”

  17. Ben says:

    Sega though should not have put $60 million in to a game and then NOT managed its development…….. There’s no way they could have been blindsighted by the game’s poor quality if they had been keeping an eye on the game and calling the shots all along like they should have been. If they did that, then the awful final product is partially their fault, since they were heavily involved.

    If they were not heavily involved and simply left Gearbox to their own devices, then the awful final product is still partially their fault, because they should not have invested so much into a product and then left a studio to its own devices. So either way, as publishers, yes, Sega shares a role in how badly the game turned out.

    I feel bad for Sega, but there’s no way they can be seen as blameless here….if they had been keeping an eye on the game’s development (as anyone who invests $60 million in its development should) then they were obviously aware of how bad the game was.

    If they had not been keeping an eye on its development and were surprised in the end by its poor quality, then that’s also bad on their part, as they should have been heavily involved in a project that so much of their money went to.

  18. Stanlee says:

    Ima just say this

    .

  19. Stanlee says:

    That is all.

    George: How’s about you don’t spam and you won’t get IP banned?

  20. Eric says:

    It just dawned on me. The guy in the picture reminds me of Tim Tebow. BTW, Gearbox sucks.

  21. peachlife says:

    Gearbox suck and they know that people are starting to catch onto this fact. They ruined duke nukem, ruined samba di amigo and now aliens. they only do borderlands which i thin k sux. glad sega are calling gearbox out. that randy pitchford is so sneaky and limey look at him in that photo.

  22. tasteofink says:

    painful man poor sega in the situation they have been in to have them take advantage of them dats so messed up

  23. Troy says:

    If this is the least bit true, Gearbox is going to spend the next 7 years in court bleeding out our money.

  24. Anonymous says:

    I never trusted Gearbox…….

    Borderlands may be their own decent franchise, but for god’s sake, I call this company “The Ruining Machine”, since it basically snatches good game franchises and mashes them in bits and turns them into generic, piece of shit linear first person shooters. An example is Duke Nukem Forever. And now Aliens.

  25. Gary says:

    Sega used to have amazing in-house developers (Overworks, Smilebit, UGA, etc) and legends like Yu Suzuki, Yuji Naka, Noryoshi Oba, Tetsuya Mizaguchi, etc.
    But they dumped or abandoned their internal talent and hired external journeyman developers to handle most of their games.
    This situation with Gearbox is an inevitable result of Sega dumping the people who made them great in the first place, and becoming a faceless, bland publisher.
    Sega treated their in-house talent like crap and have now been treated like crap by the Journeymen at Gearbox. Karma’s a bitch.

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