First of all, it is great to know your perspective, Jordan, as you´ve been following closely the world of Gran Turismo for the past 20 years. Not so many people can give the right thoughts on what Polyphony Digital is doing good or bad to guide the saga to the electronic sports world.
Yes, I also thought the stand wouldnt fill up with the finals, but I must say I wasnt that surprised when 500 spectators were watching the finales. When I got surprised for real was when my colleagues told me another bunch of hundreds of people were watching the races from outside of the stand, and specially when people started cheering our local hero,
@Coque14.
As I tried to express in
my latest post for SimRacer. es, there have been several reasons for what has ended up being the biggest event that has ever reunited more people in the history of Gran Turismo. First, the most obvious one should be that PD wanted to show off the new track, Montmeló, on its original country. But why not choosing Barcelona then? On the past two videogame weekend events in Madrid, both simracing and Gran Turismo had been present: on December 2017 Fernando Perpiñán (TRL_PERPI) won a Nissan Juke GT Sport in an individual GT Sport event organised by PlayStation League. There we could see around 50 people watching the race, most of them from spanish simracing teams. On. The number of spectators on both wasn´t that big, so I assume somehow PD knew our country was really interested in GT.
That drives me to think the influence of Lucas Ordóñez has been, as usual, fundamental. GT6 was presented at Ronda, Málaga, thanks to his recommendation of putting the circuit of Ascari in the game. For a reason Lucas has been the most suitable GTAcademy finalist, at least in my opinion, and that is his closeness and patience. We Spaniards are extremely lucky of having him. During the event he approached lots of GT players from Spain, giving them advices and talking to them as if they were his friends. I wouldn´t be surprised if finally PD decided to do the european final in Madrid because of his direct advice.
So yeah, I do think presence of GT on last occasions + Lucas was the main reason for going to Spain. I think somehow PD had to know for sure the Spanish fans would cheer up more than anybody in Europe. Maybe PD could have done something more to promote local drivers or the drivers who were the favorites to win the title (doing interviews to them and uploading them to social networks, for example), but what they certainly did perfect was making the MGW assistants go to their stand. I can tell around 100-150 people on the stand were simracing-related, but the other 400 + the people outside the stand I believe were watching the event by itself, because they were truly enjoying the virtual overtakes, battles and racing. The promotion of the final on Saturday was just great. There were a lot more people. The work of our commentators was also essential: they made the people that came on friday knew Coque was going to be in the final the following day.
It was also important the fact that people watched a wide variety of cars. We can argue if PD has done a good job or not on balancing the cars, but for sure people loved that luck factor (drivers choosing randomly the cars on the two finals, except the last one which was monotype). If we only look up fr the results, this way of structuring the live finals works (many competitive players were against going with a different car).
Spain is a country with a big interest in automotion and racing, and also in the virtual motorsport world: you could see Joaquín Verdegay giving the trophy to second place in the podium, Giorgio Mangano. Joaquín is the vice president of the Spanish Automotive Federation (RFEdA). This clearly showed how RFEdA was considering and looking closely a virtual racing simulator!. As I said before, im 100% sure PD knew somehow spanish fans would scream and applaud their local players, which is the real important thing as Jordan said. And as I told to all my buddies on the final: this is just the beggining. PD has the resources to make the biggest competitive simulator. Still a few things have to improve. But just imagine: don´t you think it was Kazunori´s first time feeling lots of emotions from a crowd cheering, in the end, for his videogame?