Borderlands 2 has enjoyed a certain level of sustained success, thanks to its steady stream of downloadable content and varied classes. One element new to the series that has kept fans coming back, though, has been the Shift codes. Initially a fairly rare novelty, Gearbox has been keeping players engaged with social events handing out the codes like candy. Gearbox president Randy Pitchford sees this as a system they can get use out of in other games and franchises.

"It's kind of like letting you into an insiders club," Pitchford told IGN. "What's interesting about SHiFT is we built this infrastructure because we wanted to be able to tighten the relationship between the gamer playing the game, the game itself on that system, and us. There's a lot of manifestations of that. We needed an infrastructure to do that.

"We created this platform because we intended to use it," he continued. "It's likely that this platform will be useful to any game that we do where there's some value in having the ability to connect between the customer playing the game and us, having that relationship." He says future iterations of the platform could build upon it with "more options, more functionality," based on this framework.