Gran Turismo Sport is one of my all-time favourite games. It helped me through pandemic lockdowns and boosted my motivation when life seemed an endless procession of dire news and walled-in horizons. GT Sport represents a gaming peak too as I finally learned racing lines and braking distances, culminating in a hot lap of the challenging Nürburgring Nordschleife. For that reason, GT7 was one of my most anticipated games of the year.
However, despite being received with near universal acclaim, some aspects of Gran Turismo 7 have worried the fandom, and these concerns have only grown. One of these is the emphasis being put on microtransactions, with grinding in Gran Turismo 7 under attack.
Grinding has been a feature of Gran Turismo ever since its debut. Players accrued credits to buy car upgrades, or saved enough to afford expensive cars, and entered certain races over and over again to do this more efficiently. Although the repetitive nature of grinding might put some people off, it can turn out to be a feature, just as grinding to level up in, say, Final Fantasy became a signature of the series.
In Gran Turismo Sport, the Ferrari 330 P4 ‘67 cost 20,000,000 – which meant working hard and grinding for some time. It certainly took me long enough to save up the credits to be able to afford it. But when that time came, you bet it felt good when it rolled into my garage. Yet I also needed it, to an extent, in order to enter a classic race car series.
But you could also forgo this hard work completely if you had enough money. GT Sport offered the chance to exchange real-world money for its more expensive cars. I never splashed out in this way, but at least it provided the option to those who may not have the time to grind it out – to just buy them with cash. However, Gran Turismo 7, after a major 30-hour outage, has quickly gained notoriety for making it more difficult to unlock cars.
Shortly after release, a community formed around GT7 as players shared tips on which races gave good credit, and which offered the best ratio for credits rewarded over the time it took to complete them. A community that forms around a game usually translates to goodwill, something that should be treasured by developers and publishers, but this goodwill has been decimated as Polyphony decided to target these races, reducing their payout in an update.
As VGC summarised, the races that have been targeted in GT7’s update, once listed out, seem to show Polyphony's desire to punish players for grinding in the way they have been, and thereby pressuring players to purchase credit packs. Meanwhile, the cash amount needed to buy these cars has grown since the previous game.
To make matters worse, Polyphony managed to magnify another pitfall of Gran Turismo 7: the need for it to be always online. As ‘Server Maintenance’ was being carried out, players were left wondering how useless a £70, mostly single-player game can be for over 24 hours.
While Gran Turismo Sport did feature frequent interruptions due to server updates, that game focused on online multiplayer. Gran Turismo 7 has a fully-fledged career mode and it’s not at all clear why this single-player mode always needs an online connection.
All of this is a lesson in how rapidly a warm reception and player goodwill can be burned off. Gran Turismo 7 was celebrated as a glorious return to form for the series, but it has now deliberately been made worse in order to make more money. Players were mostly happy to grind, which is not something that can be said too often. But this aspect has been intensified to force players to have less fun and spend more cash. Are we now expected to grind in real life, in order to afford virtual cars?
It’s a question that players will need an answer to, because currently Gran Turismo 7 is a compromised experience, and developer Polyphony Digital has turned a feature that was part of the Gran Turismo experience into a real downer for the first time in the series’ history.