The likelihood is that, if you played Aliens: Colonial Marines or Duke Nukem Forever, you didn't much care for them. Maybe they were buggy, or maybe they didn't look as good as you expected, or maybe they were just offensive. For a variety of reasons, lots of gamers just did not like them. But Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford insists that he did—and he knows how much that bugs people.
"I liked [Colonial Marines]. And it frustrates the people who didn't to hear me say that," Pitchford said in a long and wide-ranging interview with Eurogamer. "It's almost like they want to hear me say, yeah, it was rubbish. But it would be a lie for me to say it. I actually like, fuck, I like Duke Nukem Forever. I thought it was brilliant. I did! I know I'm not objective. But when I say that you should go, that guy's clearly not objective. Why would you expect me to be objective? Have you ever seen weird, bizarre art you don't even understand? The artist who created it clearly did it for a reason and loved it, you know."
Most of the interview is about the critical and commercial failures of the games, and some of it we've heard before: Pitchford defends against claims that the release version of Colonial Marines didn't look as good a promotional videos by talking about the removal of shattered glass and blood in a sequence that appeared in a pre-release demo, something he'd spoken about previously (and in a very similar fashion) in an interview with IGN. But he makes an interesting point about how the suggestion that those pre-release demos were intentionally misleading is an "absurd premise," because of the relatively small impact they have on the game's overall sales.
"Pre-orders for [Colonial Marines] were sub-150,000 units global. About 130,000 units. The game ended up selling 1.5m. The pre-orders are less than 10 per cent," he said. "And if you build bad will, you have no hope of a tail. So any strategy that's predicated on that is a failed strategy before it begins. That is not a strategy that can ever win. And it's not a strategy that any rational marketer should ever even consider."
I don't agree with Pitchford's assessment that it's all just, like, your opinion, man—which is to say that all opinions on Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever are entirely subjective, there was clearly a consensus that they'd fallen short of expectation—but he makes some interesting points. Whether they're enough to change your mind is, well, your opinion.