Gran Turismo Sport FIA Series Season One Start Bumped Back to Mid-June

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At the meantime on polyphony digital´s headquarter........
 
Sigh. This is basically the headlining feature of their game, and it's looking more and more like it's going to be a year after release till we see it.

And people wonder why Gran Turismo is no longer the powerhouse brand that it once was. Because it's awfully easy to promise things like FIA Championships, but not easy to deliver. You can only get by on promises and good will for so long before your customers start expecting you to actually deliver what you said you would.
 
Sigh. This is basically the headlining feature of their game, and it's looking more and more like it's going to be a year after release till we see it.

And people wonder why Gran Turismo is no longer the powerhouse brand that it once was. Because it's awfully easy to promise things like FIA Championships, but not easy to deliver. You can only get by on promises and good will for so long before your customers start expecting you to actually deliver what you said you would.
Blah blah blah more complains zzzz
 
I think its best for them to take their time with this.The delay isn't that big so its probably only a few technical hiccups.
 
:lol: Just after E3 and FH4 annoucement. And they think mainstream media and casual players will be impressed by a championship announcement. (Unless they announce 5 more tracks, 30 new cars and lots of new features.)
I do not understand why FH should remove users from GT or other racing sims when the 2 products are aimed at different users.
GT could also have 1000 cars, 100 tracks and 100 modes but it would not change anything because those who want to play games as horizon will buy only those certainly will not buy PC2, AC or GT.:lol:
The more I read these comparisons, the more i laugh:lol:
 
Could be worse, we waited a year and a half for heists in GTA Online. And that really was a headline feature.

I can wait a little longer for the proper FIA championships, that I'll never win anyway.

Sigh. This is basically the headlining feature of their game, and it's looking more and more like it's going to be a year after release till we see it.

And people wonder why Gran Turismo is no longer the powerhouse brand that it once was. Because it's awfully easy to promise things like FIA Championships, but not easy to deliver. You can only get by on promises and good will for so long before your customers start expecting you to actually deliver what you said you would.
 
Sigh. This is basically the headlining feature of their game, and it's looking more and more like it's going to be a year after release till we see it.

And people wonder why Gran Turismo is no longer the powerhouse brand that it once was. Because it's awfully easy to promise things like FIA Championships, but not easy to deliver. You can only get by on promises and good will for so long before your customers start expecting you to actually deliver what you said you would.


I'll tell you a secret, a new feature, as you develop it at the launch of a game, it will never be ready because you'll never have enough data to figure out what to improve, what to add and what to delete or what to change if you do not test on a large scale and that's what PD is doing and how do they do it many others like blizzard ;).
Before complaining try to have a broader perspective rather than always complaining one-way :) .
 
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:lol: Just after E3 and FH4 annoucement. And they think mainstream media and casual players will be impressed by a championship announcement. (Unless they announce 5 more tracks, 30 new cars and lots of new features.)
Yeah, probably not the best timing, unless they're actually planning to make headlines during the E3 with something more.
 
I do not understand why FH should remove users from GT or other racing sims when the 2 products are aimed at different users.
GT could also have 1000 cars, 100 tracks and 100 modes but it would not change anything because those who want to play games as horizon will buy only those certainly will not buy PC2, AC or GT.:lol:
The more I read these comparisons, the more i laugh:lol:

I think there's more overlap among casual gamers than you might think. The vast majority of people won't be able to tell the difference in physics between Horizon and Gran Turismo, they're both realistic-ish and that's good enough.

That, and money doesn't grow on trees. For most people there's a significant difference between spending $60 on a game and $120 on two games. Or $200 on two games if you have the misfortune to live in Australia.

People who aren't dedicated racing game fans (and let's be honest, we're a pretty niche community) are going to buy one and that's going to be their racing game for the next year or few.

Given what an excellent game FH3 was I think FH4 would be a better recommendation than GTS for most casual gamers.
Anyone who is seriously into sim-racing will have GTS already, or PC sims that are better.
Anyone who is seriously into e-sports and wants to do it in a car is probably better served by other games.
Anyone who wants the old style CaRPG type of game is better off with FH4 or FM7, but I'd say FH4 because Motorsport is honestly pretty dry.
Anyone who just wants to have a lark with real cars and tuning and doing stupid stunts is going to love FH4.

GTS does what it does just fine, but what it does is a very narrow niche. FH4 will snap up everyone outside that narrow niche that might have bought GTS based on past Gran Turismos or hope of what GTS could become. GTS hoped to bring motorsports to the general public, that was the idea of the 7-77 advertising campaign. Unfortunately, it's not done a particularly good job of making that fun, compared to something like Horizon.

In the 90's, you had a generation of car enthusiasts who got their introduction to cars through Gran Turismo. In 2018, I'd suggest that Forza Horizon is more likely to fill that role of being easy to get into yet engaging non-car people in cars. Tuning and hooning is fun.

I'll tell you a secret, a new feature, as you develop it at the launch of a game, it will never be ready because you'll never have enough data to figure out what to improve what to add and what to delete or what to change if you do not test on a large scale and look at it's what PD is doing and how do they do it many others like blizzard;).
Before complaining try to have a broader perspective rather than always complaining one-way:).

Ah, so you know that I don't have this broader perspective?
You know that I don't know how product development and service development works?
That's lucky, remind me to tell my boss that I don't know what I'm doing. He can fire me and I can work full time posting irrelevant opinions.

That sarcasm aside, maybe be a little careful as to what knowledge or ignorance you assign to other people. I dare say I know rather more about product development than you give me credit for. :cheers:

I'm well aware that there are difficulties in developing anything, and there's always going to be 20:20 hindsight. On the other hand, outside of Early Access it's generally expected that you ship a product with a functional implementation of whatever you're advertising it with. But let's just make a few things clear.

I would absolutely expect them to tweak and improve the FIA Championship systems each season.
I can totally see why it didn't start on day 1, and that was a great choice. Bare minimum to unlock it should have been two weeks after release, and that would have been too soon.

I would have expected them to start the first FIA Championship between 1 and 3 months after release. Long enough to get real data on how their systems handle full load. Long enough to squash any showstopper bugs that missed QA. Long enough to tweak any major balance issues. They could do a short pre-season to test scoring and registration, and that would make sense, somewhere between 1 and 4 weeks long.

Starting the first season ten months (current projection) after the release of the game is shooting yourself in the foot. It's a small game content-wise, so you've probably lost players to boredom. Online population is quite important to good matchmaking in these sorts of games. Arguably you're better off getting in early with a functional system and keeping players engaged than waiting too long until there's not enough people left to make a good service.

I'm not saying the feature is bad or anything. I'm saying that timing matters. If you have a major feature that needs lots of players to really be the best it can be, then not frontloading it in the game lifecycle means that you're consigning it to an early grave. It's going up against the Forza Motorsport and Project CARS equivalents, which have prizes, as well as iRacing which is well established. The Gran Turismo name counts for a lot in terms of pulling the casual racer in, but I don't think it's sensible to miss the golden age for your game.

Other developers, like Blizzard, know this. They absolutely keep refining features throughout the lifetime of a game. Blizzard in particular is well-known for taking established genres and polishing the crap out of them. WoW, Hearthstone, Starcraft, Diablo and Heroes of the Storm are all staggeringly different to when they first released.

But they don't leave headline features out of the game for ten months. They (almost always) started with all the features that they needed. Sometimes they were clunky. Sometimes they were plain bad (Diablo 3 Auction House, I'm looking at you). But it was there, it was working.

Polyphony has been publicising FIA Championships since 2014. It was originally going to be in GT6. Now it's going to be in GTS, but it's still a ways off. I don't think it's unreasonable at this time to point out that this continued marketing ploy of "ooo look at this shiny feature that is just around the corner (that you're actually going to see in 5 years maybe)" is not good; not for the consumer, and not for the strength of the brand.

For reference, see Peter Molyneux and Sean Murray. These guys are industry jokes because they let their dreams speak instead of their work. Polyphony would be in the same boat if it didn't have GT1 through GT4 as incredible games to back them up. But that's not a blank cheque to keep paying customers waiting.

Could be worse, we waited a year and a half for heists in GTA Online. And that really was a headline feature.

It's true, but GTA V sort of seems like one of those exceptions that proves the rule. Had the single player of GTA V not been so incredibly spectacular, GTA V would likely have gotten a lot more crap for it's slow start to online.

I mean, it got an awful lot of crap anyway but we're all pretty eager to forgive pretty much anything from GTA V simply because it's one of the most amazing games of all time. Even without the online.
 
Sigh. This is basically the headlining feature of their game, and it's looking more and more like it's going to be a year after release till we see it.

And people wonder why Gran Turismo is no longer the powerhouse brand that it once was. Because it's awfully easy to promise things like FIA Championships, but not easy to deliver. You can only get by on promises and good will for so long before your customers start expecting you to actually deliver what you said you would.
Such a gross exaggeration. It’s 5 months under a year but yeah a year. Their headlining feature is the Sport Mode AND Championships. It may not sell 10M when all is said and done but even at its currently estimated 4M sells it’s head and shoulders over any other racing games. It blows away Project Cars and Forza. Forza Horizon 3 isn’t even close.
 
I reckon these seasons are going to be longer than what we’ve had so far, It’s better they take the time now to get it right from the start than have to make changes mid season.
 
Such a gross exaggeration. It’s 5 months under a year but yeah a year.

OK, there's something that perhaps wasn't particularly clear from my post. Yes, October to June is not a year, it's only 8 months. However, I did say "it's looking more and more like it's going to be a year" by which I meant this is looking like another one of those features that Polyphony repeatedly delays.

Yes, I'm still salty about the GT6 feature and content delays/cancellations. And so that statement was an extension of that feeling, that once Polyphony starts delaying something it's a short hop and a skip to a two year wait for a track editor. You'll obviously disagree, but I think at least you can see where I'm coming from.

Their headlining feature is the Sport Mode AND Championships.

Sport Mode is just online. Every modern racing game has online. Sport Mode has some extra bits that are only shared by iRacing, pCARS2 and AC apps, but it's not exactly a headlining feature. It's a necessary one, because it's the vast majority of gameplay. DotA2 and CS:GO don't have online as a headlining feature, it's just a necessary part of the game.

An FIA sponsored competition, on the other hand, is unique and unusual. It is something that GTS offers that no other game does, or can. They've been bragging about their relationship with the FIA since 2014. They made a massive fuss about it in the advertising for GTS. I don't think it's unfair to say that the FIA content is the big draw for GTS.

It may not sell 10M when all is said and done but even at its currently estimated 4M sells it’s head and shoulders over any other racing games. It blows away Project Cars and Forza. Forza Horizon 3 isn’t even close.

Yes, GTS will stomp every other racing game in sales. No competition. Although it should be noted that FH3 was at 2.5 million at the start of last year, so it's at least in the same ball park if you want to consider the difference in console ownership.

In terms of being a good game that appeals to a wide market it's not so clear though. GTS is an odd little hybrid of a bunch of niche games, and it doesn't really excel at anything other than being pretty. Which is cool, it's still by far the best photography sim available, but I think for the vast majority of gamers they'd have more fun playing something else. This tends to be supported by the critical reviews of the game.

*P.S. If you want to take me to task over exaggeration and then want to use 4 million as the current estimated sales number for GTS, I think you should maybe take a look in the mirror. I'm fine with it, 4 million is close enough to the minimum that we know it to be if you include some very generous rounding. But perhaps you want to avoid being quite so obviously hypocritical. Even at 3.4 million GTS is still the clear best selling racing game of the generation.
 
Yes, GTS will stomp every other racing game in sales. No competition. Although it should be noted that FH3 was at 2.5 million at the start of last year, so it's at least in the same ball park if you want to consider the difference in console ownership.

It's unfair to compare GTS sales to Forza Horizon,totally different games.
 
It's unfair to compare GTS sales to Forza Horizon,totally different games.

So people keep saying? Why do you think so?

I think despite the apparent differences in style they're attempting to appeal to largely similar audiences. GTS has the "hardcore sim" crowd and Horizon has the "arcade" crowd, but in-between that is a fairly large group of people who want a realistic-ish racing game with real cars that is good fun. Horizon is obviously designed to appeal to a large audience, and Polyphony has said that GTS is too.

It seems reasonable to me to compare them. People could legitimately decide to buy one over the other, or not buy one because they already have the other. Add in that they're the two biggest console racing games of the generation and it seems even more sensible.

On the other hand, one should be careful about what comparing sales numbers means. It's not a guarantee that the one that sold more is a better game. It's not even a guarantee that it was better received by the public.

It's not really any different to movies. Things like Superman v. Batman or Suicide Squad have huge budgets, massive marketing and solid brand names to work with. They get a lot of butts into theatres based more or less on hype, but they're still kind of bad movies. Not awful, because it's hard to be truly awful with that much money and that many smart people working on something, but mediocre.

I'm not saying that GTS is mediocre, it's fine at what it does. But I think the above shows how there's not necessarily a direct correlation between sales and the quality of a product.
 
I'll tell you a secret, a new feature, as you develop it at the launch of a game, it will never be ready because you'll never have enough data to figure out what to improve, what to add and what to delete or what to change if you do not test on a large scale and that's what PD is doing and how do they do it many others like blizzard ;).
Before complaining try to have a broader perspective rather than always complaining one-way :) .
Oh right, games in the old days when there was no internet and updates never had "new features" because they did not have enough data. Games like like Gran Turismo 1 and 2...

I gotta love the excuses nowadays to allow companies to release their titles when they are mere drafts of what they should be, content- and bug-wise.
 
If Manufacturer Cup has been put on hold, why can't we get rid of the sponsored cars? My contract was up over the weekend.
 
This part of the game is just a wasted opportunity, IMO.

They team up with the FIA and started with minimal tracks/cars but with more promised. I really thought they'd run alongside the F1 season, maybe touring cars too and WRC, release tracks like Monaco and Spa, and cars as we approached the events on the calender.

It's not for me and I haven't tried these races (not good enough, lol), but if the penalty system is the same as sport mode, it's in need of fixing before they can have proper competition, surely.
 
If Manufacturer Cup has been put on hold, why can't we get rid of the sponsored cars? My contract was up over the weekend.

Contracted cars are only replaced when you sign a new contract. If you never sign a new contract again, you won’t be able to ever get rid of those cars from your garage, and you won’t be able to ever get rid of the manufactur logo from your profile.
 
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