Gran Turismo 7 microtransaction prices convey cars "rarity and value," claims director

By Kes Eylers-Stephenson,

Gran Turismo 7 reviews were positive, but off-track Polyphony Digital's racer hasn't been successful. The price of microtransactions has been criticised and the game has been offline for 24 hours. The director has addressed both.

Over on the Gran Turismo website, director and GT creator, Kazunori Yamauchi has released a statement about the two major issues plaguing the game. The first is the immediate issue of a server outage, preventing online play and anyone grabbing Gran Turismo 7 trophies.

"Immediately before the release of the 1.07 update, we discovered an issue where the game would not start properly in some cases on product versions for the PS4 and PS5," explained Yamauchi. "This was a rare issue that was not seen during tests on the development hardware or the QA sessions prior to the release, but in order to prioritise the safety of the save data of the users, we decided to interrupt the release of the 1.07 update, and to make a 1.08 correctional update. This is the reason for the delay. My sincere apologies for the late report to everyone."

Strangely, no players were informed of this issue before or during the outage. The second issue that has been raising fuss is the absolute state of the economy. Microtransactions are priced at insane amounts for cars, something we worried about in our Gran Turismo 7 review, and the most recent update try to reduce the number of credits you could earn without paying from in-game events. Here is the explanation:

"In GT7 I would like to have users enjoy lots of cars and races even without microtransactions. At the same time the pricing of cars is an important element that conveys their value and rarity, so I do think it’s important for it to be linked with real-world prices.

"I want to make GT7 a game in which you can enjoy a variety of cars in lots of different ways, and if possible would like to try to avoid a situation where a player must mechanically keep replaying certain events over and over again.

"We will in time let you know the update plans for additional content, additional race events and additional features that will constructively resolve this. It pains me that I can’t explain the details regarding this at this moment, but we plan on continuing to revise GT7 so that as many players as possible can enjoy the game.

"We would really appreciate it if everyone could watch over the growth of Gran Turismo 7 from a somewhat longer-term point of view."

Frankly, this is a pretty bizarre statement and assumes that the team thinks players want to recreate the real-life economy in a game that is all about racing ludicrously fast cars that no one normal person has access to anyway. It also doesn't acknowledge that they manipulated their own market values to create artificial scarcity, something that is illegal for companies to do in most western countries in real life. Let's hope that this isn't PlayStation's idea of a long term plan for live-service gaming for their ten upcoming titles.

Are we being too harsh here? Is there something we are missing? Let us know in the comments below!

More Gran Turismo 7 stories:

Written by Kes Eylers-Stephenson

Editor Kes is our resident expert in PlayStation and other gaming news. He writes about PS5 exclusives like The Last of Us and Horizon, PS Plus news, and his favorite games — The Witcher, Assassin’s Creed, and God of War — before an evening swim.