But is anyone here going to boycott the game, or do anything of actual significance to try and change things? Likely not, even if we should.
Bleak I know, but that's just the reality of the situation. It happened once near the start of GT7's lifecycle, but it's unlikely to happen again unless it's something along the lines of scamming customers.
It’s a bit difficult to boycott both GT and a specific aspect within the game (like AI), separately.
It’s hard in general to boycott GT as a franchise because it doesn’t have active continuous monetization - no season/battle passes or major paid DLC expansions - if we bought the game PD already has our money, they don’t have an obligation to change anything, no proverbial “financial foot on the neck”. The most power the community has over the developers would maybe be boycotting Sport mode, as the esports players are in some ways an intermediary for feedback. However, that doesn’t necessarily promote a “focus” on the problematic area with a community of GT’s size, if anything it might just make them scramble to make Sport better (like penalties and daily race selections) and that’s it.
There’s little to no way to get PD to focus on community gripes (like AI) with how little community spaces there are to interact or at least see feedback. Plus, with AI as an example, I don’t recall that ever being a specific marketing point or feature in any trailer of the past four games - so it’s not like there’s a good fulcrum or argument point to boycott on even if you wanted to boycott by just not purchasing the next game (and even then, releases are looking to average around 4-5 years… so this process just gets slower and slower). The closest it came was Sophy, and even Sophy AI came later and was always marketed as a non-expansive functionality for the time being with no set timeframe or map of when or what it could fully be. If you wanted to quit GT over AI nonsense to stick it to PD they have no incentive to care, as there’s no change in their revenue from it until the next product goes on sale years down the line, which will still probably sell very well to the rabid fans and casual market. As well, there’s unlikely to be a Venn diagram that has a cross section of players that would be willing to stop playing GT7 as some sort of “boycott” that also purchased microtransaction credit packs - seemingly those too also only sell to diehard (perhaps delusional) fans, casual market, or folks with a lot of disposable income and not as much time to play games, none of which are likely to know, or more importantly,
care about the depths of the AI problems.
It’s a baffling problem to try to solve as a fan, but even more baffling that the problem exists in the first place - there isn’t a financial incentive to keep the AI and/or sub-100 throttle usage neutered, and they already have some difficulty settings in the game, so there
is accessible programming behind it. There isn’t some guy in an office in Japan twiddling an evil little mustache just to see how far he can push things - that’s absurd. But I don’t know why there’s so many design choices like this going on throughout so many aspects of modern GT game
s - many were also in in Sport, but I’d argue you could trace some as far back as GT6, AI especially.
Literally just having an option to strip the rubber bands and algorithms and letting the AI vehicles drive as they would naturally in the game would be an improvement to what we have now.
