In yet another example of why you should wait a while before purchasing a videogame. Gran Turismo 7’s launch has been fraught with rather more difficulties than expected. A shame, because it stood to be a good return to form for the franchise.
Sometime between GT5 and 6, The people at Polyphony Digital discovered a rather unsurprising truth. Despite all of their simulated cars sounding like various flavors of white goods, their physics engine and recreations of famous tracks were now so accurate that people who were really really good at the game had rather accidentally become prime candidates for racing drivers. A trait that was exploited by both increasing Gran Turismo’s sponsorships on real life events and through the reality simply known as GT Academy.
This, of course, reached its natural conclusion on Gran Turismo Sport, a game which was no less than completely dedicated to competitive daily online races. Gone was the single player mode and the enormous library of cars which included at least 150 Nissan Skylines to be replaced with the digital equivalent of racing school. And the players who liked the game because of the ability to pootle around in the first car ever made or see if you can beat a C1 Corvette using a Volvo 240? They need not apply. Sport would eventually add a single player mode and increase their car lineup, but this was merely an addition to the core nature of the game, and it was extremely successful.
Nevertheless, Kazunori Yamauchi, CEO of Polyphony Digital, decreed that the upcoming game would return the familiar GT experience, generally understood to be a single player campaign where you start by buying a shitbox and go all the way to vehicles limited only by fantasy, with championships both sublime and ridiculous along the way. Unfortunately, it is 2022, and it seems like neither Kaz, Polyphony Digital, or Sony were interested in bucking one of the industry’s less savory trends and decided to pack the game with In-game purchases. Not three weeks after release, the game experienced an internet outage that meant users were left unable to do such complex things as “saving the game”, and people began realizing that the game encouraged grinding much more than previous revisions. A move that has been widely speculated to stem from the usual microtransaction encouragement of “You can spend a full workweek’s worth of time trying to get this car…or….” Except that by this point calling a $20 purchase of imaginary money a “microtransaction” is laughable.
So right now you have a game where in-game payouts were slashed at the same time a bug took the game offline, the public reacted viscerally to this to the point that Kaz had to publicly address their customers and two additional bugfix patches have dropped. April promises to be another make or break month, with updates promising more events with higher rewards, as well as the ability to sell cars (!). It also vastly increases the cap of credits that you can earn instead of buy.
That the number of credits you could buy was apparently limitless is the most concerning bit of this all.
