Available on PS4 and PS5 since March 4, 2022, Gran Turismo 7 is annoying some of its users. The latest game updates are causing a lot of issues.
An ode to car racing, Gran Turismo 7 is a game designed for car lovers. Extremely realistic, addictive and designed to make us collect as many vehicles as possible, Polyphony Digital’s latest game won over many critics upon its release. Since then, its popularity rating has plummeted, as evidenced by its average rating of 2.6/10 on the Metacritic site on March 19, 2022.
How to explain this? Gran Turismo 7 continues the dumplings. After being the victim of a huge and almost unprecedented breakdown for a game freshly released on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, the game is accused of having changed its rules to make players pay, who have already paid between 70 and 80 euros for get it.
A 30 hour outage
It all started with Grand Turismo 7 update 1.07, released on Thursday, March 17. Polyphony Digital identified a bug after it was released and, to avoid causing problems for players, decided to pause its servers. It took more than 24 hours for the game developers to release patch 1.08 which, after being plagued with problems in turn for a few hours, ended up restoring the normal state of the game.
This whole situation raises the issue of games not working offline. Is it normal to pay so much for a game that only opens if its Internet box is running correctly and the servers follow?
Does Gran Turismo want to rip us off?
Update 1.07 not only caused a major bug, it also brought some changes to the microtransactions system present in the game.
Each time we complete a race, we earn credits that allow us to buy vehicles. As users on Reddit have noticed, patches 1.07 and 1.08 greatly lower the amount of these rewards. We sometimes earn more than half as much as before, which makes obtaining new vehicles more complicated. Did Polyphony Digital wait for the critics to come out in the media to make their game more complicated, and increase the need for some to buy virtual credits? When Gran Turismo was launched, testers were concerned about the price of certain vehicles, which were too high for the credits that can be obtained for free in the game.
On his company’s website, Kazunori Yamauchi, the boss of Polyphony Digital, published a letter of apology. He promises fans evolutions and asks them to judge the game over the long term.