"No Regrets" About Aliens: Colonial Marines, CEO Says

Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford has yet again defended his studio's critically panned 2013 shooter Aliens: Colonial Marines. In a new interview, Pitchford says he has no regrets about the game, which personally cost him as much as $15 million after the game failed meet commercial expectations.

"I lost somewhere between $10 million and $15 million that I invested in that game. I still don't regret it," Pitchford told IGN. "I wouldn't trade that experience for anything."

When Colonial Marines launched in February 2013, the response was overwhelmingly negative. Pitchford said he never expected to please everyone with the game, however.

"I understand that there's some people that didn't enjoy it and I'm very sorry about that," he explained. "That's the nature of entertainment--some of my favorite 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."

Pitchford went on to say that there is no truth to the claims that Gearbox used funds meant to support the development of Colonial Marines on the studio's bread-winning franchise, Borderlands.

"Some people invented this myth that if we tried it would have been good, so we must not have tried," he said. "So there's this rumor 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," he added. "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."

This isn't the first time Pitchford has responded to critics of Gearbox's games. Earlier this week during his keynote address at the Develop Conference, Pitchford said it's human nature that when some people see a nice sandcastle, they want to destroy it.

"That's their way of relating to that. It's typically a less sophisticated mind," he said. "There's a dark part of us all that likes the idea of crushing a sandcastle, but most of us will respect it and let it be. That's why we like playing video games where we can blow stuff up and no one gets hurt."

Gearbox's next games are the MOBA-like PC and console shooter Battleborn and a third Borderlands game. In addition, just this week Pitchford revealed that Gearbox has started concept development on new Duke Nukem and Brothers in Arms games. However, in both cases, Gearbox is hoping to work with a partner instead of developing them internally.