Putting it on a Saturday was a poor decision to begin with, as people are watching “real world” sports or doing whatever people normally do on weekends.
Additionally, it’s pre-recorded (less incentive to watch as its broadcast) and there’s no potential game update/DLC announcements expected to come from it to lure in the casual fans and players.
Also outside of the GT community platforms I don’t know how much awareness was raised about these broadcasts. I’m fairly well-embedded in the racing game community thanks to my work and even so I only caught on a few days ago that their events were happening. How is a casual fan, or somebody that doesn’t own Gran Turismo 7 supposed to know about this event unless it gets shoved into their feeds, and when it does, what reason is there for them to watch?
Finally (and this isn’t really Sony’s fault or anything, just the reality of 2022), it’s a virtual event and to a degree I think the appeal of those has been dwindling ever since the sim racing boom of 2020 died down in the second half of that year.
I’m sure the show itself and the racing was good, but as somebody peering from the outside in, there’s very little incentive to watch, whereas I tuned into the GT Sport events in 2018/19 long after I stopped playing that game (because of how appealing they were).
Without massive resources or the right blend of highly popular competitors (like Jarno, like Max Verstappen, like Jimmy Broadbent etc.) it’s hard to bring in the casual sim racer because they’d rather play the game than watch a bunch of people play it faster than them.
