You know how amateur magician and former Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford wears horrible shirts? So the border areas Chef accidentally came up with the idea of auctioning off his old, used clothes to support a charity. Which charity? No idea. Because that’s the schedule we deserve.
That auction (and even the URL is cursed) lists Pitchford’s old, unwanted clothes at a suggested value of $400 each. 47 of them. Each more hideous and already worn by Randy-Pitchford than the last.
Well, there’s a version of this story where Pitchford does this as a stunt to gain exposure for a deeply worthy cause, maybe a life-saving charity that really touched his heart (as all those shirts almost did). We do not experience this version. The auction tweet suggests that it will be about “developer grants,” but neither the tweet nor the auction page states which ones. Maybe a really wonderful one. But we don’t know.
GamesRadarwho first discovered this madnessdug around on Gearbox’s own website and found this The company runs its own scholarship program, with grants ranging from $500 to $1,500, along with classroom time offerings. It really is a registered association, which was founded in 2019 by educators Isabel Mendiola and Peter Haydock and is called Gearbox Labs. However, we should stress that this specific Gearbox charity is not mentioned anywhere in the promotion of this auction. The “About This Auction” section on the Bid Beacon website was simply left blank.
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We reached out to Gearbox to see if they can solve this mystery and will update the story if they respond.
Disturbingly, the Bid Beacon website reports that multiple bids have been received for some shirts, although everything has been listed as a “blind bid” so we can’t see how close anyone has bid to the suggested $400. I could not confirm if the site accepts negative numbers.
Of course, if this is really being done to support a charity that bears the company’s own name, not only is it so damn weird that they don’t say it, it is You might be wondering why a developer — who himself made about $180,000,000 net last year — needs to sell old clothes to make money. Not to mention a company owned by the all-devouring Embracer Group.
In the meantime no thanks.