Randy Pitchford is head of Gearbox Entertainment.
Randy Pitchford is CEO of Gearbox Entertainment.
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Randy Pitchford: Games as a hobby trumps games as a service

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 7 min

Randy Pitchford started Gearbox back in 1999, and since that time, the company’s games such as the Borderlands series have sold more than 100 million copies. And Pitchford has come to believe that games as a hobby trumps games as a service, and he warned against putting something other than gamer’s interests first.

In a fireside chat with me at our second annual GamesBeat and Facebook Gaming Summit, Pitchford said that focusing on making fun matters more than anything else.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.