New DLC character brings Borderlands 4 back to popularity and tens of thousands of players

A year after its release, Borderlands 4 wasn't exactly in great shape in terms of player count and had mixed reviews on Steam. But a recent DLC boosted peak concurrent players to 20,000, pushed the game into the trending section — all thanks to a single new character.

As a reminder, Borderlands 4 launched on September 12. At launch, the game started with 304,398 concurrent players. But before long, players left the Gearbox Software project, and in recent months the game's player count had hovered between 2,000 and 6,000 players.

However, everything changed with the release of the latest DLC. On September 10, 2026, the company released several pieces of content at once as part of the 1.10 update: Story Pack 2 "FL4K and the Last Resort," a new Vault Hunter - Loveless the Hacker and Bounty Pack 5 "Amara and the Vile Shadows," along with a free 10-level increase to the max level cap for all players.

The star of the release was Loveless a cyber-hacker assassin with three active skills built around hacking, cybernetics, and elemental damage. Her content can be purchased separately for $9.99, or obtained as part of the Vault Hunter Pack and Super Deluxe Edition.

It was the new character's design that drew in thousands of players. Snow-white hair, gold piercings, and a cybernetic look immediately caught people's attention. Loveless's skin in particular got a lot of attention — a fairly revealing outfit paired with her new hairstyle.

The situation was further boosted by free play weekends on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation. As a result, concurrent players climbed to nearly 17,000 at the time of writing, with a 24-hour peak of 20,407 players.

For comparison, the game's average player count over the past month was around 4,000. In other words, in a single day the game improved its player count fivefold, and it entered Steam's top three bestsellers.

However, a large part of the community believes this is only temporary. Once players finish the new content and unlock all of Loveless's skins, the game will likely start losing popularity again. On top of that, the free weekend ends on Monday, and that's when the player count is expected to drop by several thousand. Either way, Loveless's story has become a textbook example of how one well-designed character can pull a game back from near-obscurity into the sales charts for a few days.

As a final note, the game's universe keeps expanding rumor has it that Bungie is working on a Borderlands remake that will resemble Destiny.