Honestly, for me... willing to pay for cars or whatever all hinges on the AI being absolutely horrendous. if the AI didn't blow, the thought of doing micro transactions wouldn't even cross my mind.
But here's where I become an introspective person:
I'm a smile's per miles kinda guy. In previous gran Turismo Titles, I had zero problem grinding. Nowadays, I'm well into my 30's, I have a bit of disposable income. I have ZERO PROBLEM supporting a game, franchise, company, content creator, ect. that makes my life a little better (across a wide spectrum of hobbies, industries, products might I add).
However, I'm willing to bet I'm in the VAST MINORITY of people who actually partake in this (and like mentioned earlier, I have yet to purchase a single piece of content from ANY GAME yet). I think PD and Sony are smart. They know how to hedge their bets. They're not going to push future customers away. ESPECIALLY when their focus of this game is to bring people back into the franchise and refresh it for another 25 years.
Sony and PD's target audience isn't me....
It's the 14 year old me, alongside my 13 year old brother, alongside my 42 year old Dad.... who spent COUNTLESS HOURS playing this game in 1997.
Once upon a time I would have made a similar speech about Blizzard. It would not have aged well.
Things change. I hope you're right, but these aren't charities. Polyphony and Sony are smart, but they're not necessarily using their smarts on things that directly benefit you and me. These are businesses owned by people who hold money above all else. We've seen plenty of companies burn goodwill for the sake of immediate returns, and it hurts.
You can't say that Polyphony will never do that. You can say that they haven't so far (which is sort of debatable, given GT6, but they seem to have learned their lesson), and you can keep an eye out for things that might be a red flag. Like a microtransaction system where you pay money to bypass gameplay.
I'm fine with paying for entertainment, and my Steam library will absolutely attest that I've bought games from publishers that I never played simply because I wanted to support them more. The world needs more Yoko Taro games. But there are some ways of "supporting" a company that probably shouldn't exist. Buying in-game currency is one of them.
I would prefer release day Car Passes or Season Passes to buying in-game currency, because at least those things are tied to specific assets that you're purchasing access to. Sell a GT Cafe career expansion, sell a Tourist Trophy expansion, sell more ridiculous magical VGTs if they have to. All these things have incentives for the developer to make the best product possible.
But buying in-game currency is paying to skip playing parts of the game, and how attractive that is to a player is entirely controlled by the developer. The incentive is to make the game grindier not because it makes the game better, but because it makes more money.
Grind isn't necessarily bad if it's there for a good design reason. Elden Ring is a prime example of a game where you have to put in a lot of hard work to achieve something, and the achievement is only as rewarding as it is because you had to work so hard for it. It's great, and that's the path the GT7 grind should be going down. You play because it's fun and you're rewarded appropriately for your time and skill.
Grind
is bad if it's there to frustrate the player into dropping money to overcome it. And even if it's not primarily being used that way, the MTX system is in the game because someone had the thought "
I bet some people will give us money to make the game less annoying" instead of "
I bet we could design out some of the annoyances in our game".
Bringing us full circle to
if the AI didn't blow, the thought of doing micro transactions wouldn't even cross my mind. It's unlikely that the AI is bad because they want the gameplay to be boring to incentivise microtransactions, but it's another small reason for them not to care that much about improving it...
