Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has spoken about the myriad claims surrounding the development and release of Aliens: Colonial Marines

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“ I lost somewhere between $10 million and $15 million that I invested in that game. I still don’t regret it – I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.

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“ There’s this rumour we’d embezzled money from Aliens and spent it on Borderlands. ... the actual truth is the opposite, which is a lot more embarrassing.

“ I’m just grateful that people care enough about our stuff that it’s a worthy enterprise for them to spend that kind of time.

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Gearbox Software was fighting against a lawsuit with SEGA that claims Gearbox funneled money for Aliens: Colonial Marines into other projects. The studio was dropped from the suit back in May.Speaking to IGN at Develop: Brighton, Pitchford has revealed he lost between $10 million and $15 million of his own money on the project, and refuted the accusations that have been leveled at the studio."I don’t know," he begins when asked what happened. "We made an Aliens game. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything in the world. I got to, the team and us, we got to rebuild the Sulaco. We got to work with Syd Mead to do that. We got to build all of Hadley’s Hope, not just the few hallways of the colony that you see in the film. We built power loaders and APCs and dropships. Holy crap, we went out to The Derelict! I’m just so glad that I got the opportunity to spend time in that space. I understand that there’s some people that didn’t enjoy it and I’m very sorry about that. That’s the nature of entertainment – some of my favourite bands who’ve made some of the songs I think are the best in the world have other songs on B-sides that I completely don’t care for. It’s going to happen. So I don’t know what to say."I lost somewhere between $10 million and $15 million that I invested in that game. I still don’t regret it – I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. But no, the plan was to entertain people with this awesome Aliens experience."What’s weird is that I actually like the game. Some people invented this myth that if we tried it would have been good, so we must not have tried. Maybe we didn’t spend the money on this game, maybe we spent it on another one that was good? So there’s this rumour we’d embezzled money from Aliens and spent it on Borderlands. Firstly, that’s absurd, and secondly the actual truth is the opposite, which is a lot more embarrassing. We took a huge amount of the money that we’d made off the first Borderlands, invested it into Aliens trying to make it as good as we could, and still ended up disappointing a huge number of people. That’s a whole other kind of failure! But it's all from this fundamental truth, which is we tried to do a good job and entertain people and some people didn’t like it."In the final game, there’s no blood on the ground and no glass shattering… and that’s a scandal. Like, the tiniest thing! People are fine with us completely changing the art direction of Borderlands, but this? It proves it’s not about the change it’s about how you feel about the result. Then you think why is the result like this, then you go looking for reasons for the change at little micro things."When asked whether the final changes were due to the earlier demos being 'vertical slices' of the finished game as was the case with Watch Dogs or The Witcher 3, Pitchford denied this. For those unaware, a 'vertical slice' is a snippet of gameplay able to run at a very high fidelity simply because that's what it's designed to do. Once the rest of the game is added around this, however, and the systems have to contend with an entire world to keep running, it becomes much harder to do."The next one was in the very next shot in a room where originally there was one of those long halogen tube lights that was swinging and it looked pretty cool, but in the final game the level designer decided a klaxon would be better so changed it and suddenly that’s a scandal! It went from a swinging light to a spinning light and all those things could have been either way and it wouldn’t have affected the results. The content that those people produce, they profit from views. I get it, and it’s part of our world but dude… I mean, I still see videos from people suggesting 9/11 is staged and they’re very convincing but… I mean I’m just grateful that people care enough about our stuff that it’s a worthy enterprise for them to spend that kind of time."Sometimes we’ll make a great track that everybody likes and sometimes we’ll make a song that’s just off, and that’s the nature of the beast. But we gotta keep making stuff."Pitchford also spent some time chatting about the fact a new "authentic" Brothers in Arms title is on the way, as well as what the future holds for the Borderlands franchise

Luke Karmali is IGN UK News Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter