Gran Turismo 7's Microtransaction Pricing Revealed

[SestoScudo]

Not a problem for me its just optional

Its this kind of mentality that cancer grows.

Every time we said it was optional led to us getting this stuff shoved down our throats.

Remember this human psychology is geared towards stuff that looks good.

Hence why cosmetics microtransactions are the most predatory of the bunch.

I dont want to hear any bs excuses of how expensive development is when these corporations can spend millions while pocketing billions. There needs to be something like trade unions when it comes to games and gamers.

While Indies even Mods do a better job despite not having millions in their budget.

 

[BrockAustin7]

Why would anyone spend money on cars in the game if you cannot race them meaningfully? I raced against AI on Bathurst and they went all Austin Powers at 'The Cutting'. In an 8 lap race I won by 5 laps because they couldn't figure out that corner. My car and the AI car were basically the same.

While I'm here...being able to save custom races would also be nice.

 

[Ande3200]

Its this kind of mentality that cancer grows.

Every time we said it was optional led to us getting this stuff shoved down our throats.

Remember this human psychology is geared towards stuff that looks good.

Hence why cosmetics microtransactions are the most predatory of the bunch.

I dont want to hear any bs excuses of how expensive development is when these corporations can spend millions while pocketing billions. There needs to be something like trade unions when it comes to games and gamers.

While Indies even Mods do a better job despite not having millions in their budget.

I am not saying i like microtransactions but i don’t have a problem with them being there, unless content is locked behind it, pd offers free cars and tracks name another racing title that does that, microtransactions might be their buisness model, like others charge dlc for

 

[Dak0ta]

Its this kind of mentality that cancer grows.

Every time we said it was optional led to us getting this stuff shoved down our throats.

Remember this human psychology is geared towards stuff that looks good.

Hence why cosmetics microtransactions are the most predatory of the bunch.

I dont want to hear any bs excuses of how expensive development is when these corporations can spend millions while pocketing billions. There needs to be something like trade unions when it comes to games and gamers.

While Indies even Mods do a better job despite not having millions in their budget.

i mean, people knew the game was coming with mtx and still chose to buy it

 

[AutumnalGlow]

pd offers free cars and tracks

$70 cars and tracks*

The game wasn't free. They haven't offered anything for free.

 

[Ande3200]

$70 cars and tracks*

The game wasn't free. They haven't offered anything for free.

Updates will proably be free including both cars and tracks, if you read my comment proably you would understand that

 

[AutumnalGlow]

Updates will proably be free including both cars and tracks, if you read my comment proably you would understand that

It's only adding content that should've been there on release. I see that as part of my $70 purchase.

 

[Touring Mars]

Unless and until PD and/or Sony drop their scandalous pricing of their so-called microtransactions, I'm very sad to say that GT7 will remain a second-rate game.

Given how great the game could be without the frankly horrific in-game economy, it is still so shocking to see that they truly expect people to pay £16 for 2 million Credits. And making that many credits has never been less fun than it is now.

Seriously, has there been many other games that have made their players work quite so hard just to enjoy the game at all?

 

[equalitus]

These prices are ridiculous. I have nothing against MTX, but I strongly dislike them when they have a direct impact on the game balance (pay 2 win). If they force people to grind to unbearable levels, that's really disappointing.

Having said that I have an honest question for people who are fundamentally opposed to MTX. What alternatives exist for studios and developers to run a profitable business and keep developing and supporting a game, when the AAA development budgets today are in the hundreds of millions of dollars and games take years to be developed by hundreds of people who need to be paid? These are no longer the days when a game went out to the market and got forgotten. We as players expect games to be patched and supported for years, yet we expect to pay only once as we did 15 or 20 or 30 years ago? Something's gotta give

With budgets being so high, it's almost impossible to break even just by selling copies of the game, especially if the game is to be supported into the future. Developers have to have a way of monetizing their work.

You doubt that PD is getting a positive profit margin by selling the game at $70? It would definitively have a positive profit margin if cars were as easily obtainable as in GT3/GT4 & GT6 with seasonal events. Because it would sell more, during the first year, which is not too late yet.

Fortunately in this sort of game where winning races is skill based and BoP exists, if people have that much money laying around it still doesn't give them an advantage over me. There's no benefit to be had in a game that gifts you more cars than you can handle lol.

It's impossible to be gifted/awarded more cars than one can handle, because it is a choice for the individual player what to do with the cars and a choice to either progress fast or slow, or at medium pace. That is what made most earlier GT games fun, because we had a choice to progress fast if desired.

I don’t mind grind for 500-1000 hours to get all the cars

If you said 50 to 100 hours I'd agree with you.

Not sure if I understand the concern of everyone with MTs in this game.

As far as I know of, there is nothing that can't be earned through usual in-game progression and players aren't locked out of any part of the game for not buying them thus making microtransactions totally optional. Most of us, or at least I, expected the game to require a high level of grinding based on previous entries and reviewers did all that they could in the limited time they had to try and give and accurate portrayal of the game.

I don't see the problem on those who have the money to spend and are willing to do so in order to hurry up there in-game progression. I do think it's ironic paying 70 dollars for a game and then paying extra money to fast forward through it, but to each their own.

Far different subject is games like Rocket League were you are not allowed to trade your randomly obtained items with other players unless you buy some of their currency or Genshin Impact where there are like 8 different currencies that completely obscure wat you actually get for your money.

How many people critizising MTs won't consider buying them due to the high price?? How different would their playthrough be if there were no MTs in Gran Turismo 7??

By the way, I am not sure the fact that there are some people more propense to buying microtransactions is something to take into account. Taking the same arguement and applying it to credit cards we could say that they shouldn't exist because advertising and offers encourage more succeptible people to spend money.

Lastly, why should MTs be included in a game review if their aren't any intrusive ads (As someone mentioned before I think their presence can be removed from most of the game) and they aren't the main method of progression?

Please forgive me if I offended somone with this post, but I am intrigued by several of the comments I've seen on this forum.

I would much rather pay $150 and then GT7 had an editor where I could change everything I wanted.

 

[Ande3200]

If you said 50 to 100 hours I'd agree with you.

I don’t grind all time but 500-1000 hours of just playing the game is fair to me to collect most of cars, their is difference between grinding and playing the game, i stated my last comment a bit wrong, but yes making money now is quite difficult, so i don’t even bother with most expensive legend cars, those that intrest me i buy, 911 gt1 was my favorite yet, and are intrested to pick up the Mercedes 300 sl and its not to difficult to 1,1 mil

 

[wheelhp]

I don’t grind all time but 500-1000 hours of just playing the game is fair to me to collect most of cars, their is difference between grinding and playing the game, i stated my last comment a bit wrong, but yes making money now is quite difficult, so i don’t even bother with most expensive legend cars, those that intrest me i buy, 911 gt1 was my favorite yet, and are intrested to pick up the Mercedes 300 sl and its not to difficult to 1,1 mil

I think that's a very slippery slope to call "fair"

 

[Samus]

The number of people who play any single game for 500-1000+ hours is TINY. Unless you're making a MMORPG, you shouldn't be framing your game around taking that long.

To suggest 500-1000 hours is fair to get "most of the cars", not even all of them, is absurd. Most people do not have that kind of time to spare, they should not be denied all the content because they can "only" play for 200 hours. That is still a huge time investment.

 

[equalitus]

Maybe I got too used to those predatory games with heavy microtransactions, but GT7 MTX is far short from being predatory. Compare to truly predatory games, GT7 has the following shortcomings;

1. Low per-item ceiling I expect GT7 to have a ceiling somewhere around $200/car, unless they ditched the 20 million credit limit. This is far too low to be considered as predatory. A few thousand dollar ceiling for a single item is pretty common, and I've seen $1 million ceiling as well (and the game has numerous people who have hit that ceiling).
2. Low overall ceiling Low per-item ceiling naturally leads to low overall ceiling. Even if you bought every single car in this game with cash, it only cost you $20-40k. Some games have $10-30 million overall ceiling. No kidding.
3. Lacking the encouragement for MTX How many 20 million car would you need? You need exactly zero at this moment (and you can't even buy one at this moment). Then how much credit do you need to enjoy the game? Not much. Currently, those extra credits are only useful for a) someone who want to clear the all 39 menu books as soon as possible, and b) someone who want to get some trophies as soon as possible (specifically Three Legendary Cars and Memento from Le Mans trophy), and c) someone who just want to collect cars for no reason. This is not how you encourage people to spend money. Typically they implement a lot of expensive meta items (i.e. outperform every other car in its class by significant margin, so you have to buy one in order to be competitive), and then frequently replacing those existing meta to other meta to make people buy more (like once a week or once every 2 months). And that's just one strategy (out of a few dozens other strategies they impose). I highly doubt PD would do such thing, but even if they do, it won't cost you whole lot due to its low ceiling.
4. Grindability No one would spend $100k or $1 million or $10 million for something that's reasonably grindable. As such, no matter how hard you grind, you go nowhere close to the ceiling in those games (unless you somehow grind it for 5,000 years). That's not the case in GT7. 20 million could be earned in 15 hours, which is perfectly grindable.
5. Wrong Pricing GT7 2 million credit cost you $20. This is exactly the opposite of predatory games. Those games almost always use obfuscation. For example, you first buy 4200 in-game coins for $100. You can use the coin to dress up the car, but when you try to tune up your car, you need to convert those coins to other in-game currency for 13:1 ratio. If you want to buy a car, then you need to conver that other in-game currency to tickets for 3.5:1 ratio. They try everything to reduce the resistance of spending acutal money, which GT7 didn't do.
6. Loot box This is the very foundation of predatory games, because exploiting gambling addiction is proven to be far more lucrative than honest selling. A 20 million credit car can be bought outright for $200 in GT7, which is far less predatory than selling a loot box for $20 which has 10% chance of winning the car.

The current implementation of GT7's microtransaction is more like a balancing act between two camps (one with more time less money, and the other one with more money less time) rather than preadatory business practice. Predatory microtransaction would look like this;

• Initially, the best grinding method gives you 500 credit/h (not 1.3 million/h), which barely covers the oil change. Auto grinding gives you 100 credit/h, and daily marathon gives you 3000 credit.
• All endurance races require at least 500k credit car, so you need either 3 months of auto grinding or $1000 spending or somewhere inbetween to get this car. You could get 2000 credit/h manually or 500 credit/h automatically on those endurance races.
• You can't buy the credit. You can only buy loot boxes, $18 worth of in-game currency for 11 draws. You have very low probability for those overpowered/fast/meta cars (like 0.012%, so you have a good chance of not getting one after spending $20k).
• There are multiple tiers of overpowered cars. Best one has the lowest chance and best Gr. 3 car could beat regular Gr. 1 car all day long. You get gradually higher chance of winning one for the less overpowered cars. You usually get regular cars, which is a no match to even slightly overpowered cars.
• The meta car is constantly changing as they update new (even more overpowered) cars once every a few months, so you have to keep buying those loot boxes.
• If you collect every car in each category, you get 10% speed boost for that category. Likewise, if you collect every car in each manufacturer, you get 5% boost. Same goes for the country/etc. It leads you to collect every car (and remember you have many 0.05% chance cars here and there).

You're totally wrong because GT3/GT4/GT6+seasonals was the balancing act between too short time and too long time to get credits to buy cars to race and to have much more fun than with the cheap stupid boring slow cars.
We obviously disagree on the definition of predatory business practice. I'll pay €100 for GT7 but then I decide all the parameters and options with an editor. Deal?

 

[wheelhp]

My husband only hits me a little bit, it's really not that bad. Some people are far worse than him, there are women that get killed by their husbands so I think a small beating every now and then is totally fine.

How about no beatings at all?

The problem with most people in that particular rut is the lack of imagination. If you can't imagine a better situation and are fine with adjusting yourself to "whatever" then you'll always have low expectations, and low standards. It becomes your norm. You even start looking at things that seem comparatively worse to bolster the righteousness of your stubborn beliefs. Little pop psych 101 for ya. When something good comes along, they start to finally get the skepticism question but twisted, "is this what a good service feels like? or is this just another scam?" but they can't simply accept when things are actually bad initially, it's too confronting, they just learn to roll with the punches, enjoy the copium, and somewhat have no energy reserves to want to see beyond them. It's mind boggling I know.

 

[Ande3200]

The number of people who play any single game for 500-1000+ hours is TINY. Unless you're making a MMORPG, you shouldn't be framing your game around taking that long.

To suggest 500-1000 hours is fair to get "most of the cars", not even all of them, is absurd. Most people do not have that kind of time to spare, they should not be denied all the content because they can "only" play for 200 hours. That is still a huge time investment.

Those that dosen’t have time can’t either expect to have the same amount of content in the game, you should be rewarded for more time spent, and like i said if you have a good time playing the game and just play it, 500 hours is not bad, and take the cars as you can, its not the end of the world becouse you don’t have all the cars in the first month, gt7 will be in service for probably 4 years or longer, so getting some cars 1 year after dosen’t have to be a bad thing, of you want easier to get all the content quickly their is forza where you can collect all the cars within 3 weeks, i think thats way to easy, but too difficult in gt7, a mix between there would be good in my opinion, they need to make so you can earn around 1,5-2 mil per hour,
In one or more ways just not that fishermans ranch rally race but i think you should earn more money the faster cars you use, and i bet you will get more once gr,1 championchips arrive,

I think later down the line plenty of more options will be availble to earn good money, but more events should be included day one

 

[Samus]

Those that dosen’t have time can’t either expect to have the same amount of content in the game, you should be rewarded for more time spent, and like i said if you have a good time playing the game and just play it, 500 hours is not bad, and take the cars as you can, its not the end of the world becouse you don’t have all the cars in the first month, gt7 will be in service for probably 4 years or longer, so getting some cars 1 year after dosen’t have to be a bad thing, of you want easier to get all the content quickly their is forza where you can collect all the cars within 3 weeks, i think thats way to easy, but too difficult in gt7, a mix between there would be good in my opinion, they need to make so you can earn around 1,5-2 mil per hour,
In one or more ways just not that fishermans ranch rally race but i think you should earn more money the faster cars you use, and i bet you will get more once gr,1 championchips arrive,

I think later down the line plenty of more options will be availble to earn good money, but more events should be included day one

I think you're underestimating how long that is.

A linear story driven game is usually 6-20 hours. An expansive open world game is usually 40-100 hours, depending on how much optional stuff you do, or just general playing around.

At the end of those games you've experienced everything the game has to offer.

No, people only playing a GT game for 10 to 20 hours should not expect to have experienced everything, but 500 hours is way too much.

 

[Touring Mars]

Not only is 500 hours way too much, it is also a question of what you need to do in that time to achieve what used to be simple in previous titles. Every hour spent grinding is an hour that could have been spent enjoying the game more, and that's what really annoys me. Grinding is not even about skill or getting/being better at the game - it's merely a way to milk the economy of the game.

But when the only other option available to access a substantial amount of content (that should really be accessible by other more enjoyable means) is to fork out crazy amounts of real money over and above what has already paid by owners of the game, then serious questions need to be asked about where the game developers are going with this, and how much they expect loyal fans and dedicated gamers to tolerate.