@Amar
What you've said is for the most part true, but let's do a quick comparison. I don't really like to bring out that
other game, but seeing as how it's the closest console racer competitor it's inevitable. First let's take a look at the gran-turismo.com website. (this is off the US version of the site)
Gran-Turismo:
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Home: Contains a nice slider at the top that switches between the new suits and helmets that came with 1.10 and GT Boutique where you can buy real-life GT branded apparel. The Spotlight and Featured Stories sections contain 1 piece information about Gran Turismo 5. Everything else is about the GT Academy and Kaz's personal achievement at the Nurburgring 24hr.
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Products: Self explanatory really...just contains the list of all the GT games.
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News: Sadly no relevant GT5 information here either. Just news on the GT Academy winners, more GT apparel, and the closing of the GT5
servers. Also sprinkled in is some GT:TV content
- I'll skip over Gallery, GT:TV and GT Academy because they seem to be outdated and rather pointless
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Forums: I've done some perusal over the forums and it seems the only person that you could say was "affiliated" with SCE/PD is MastrGT, but there's no official word if he has direct communication with SCE or PD. There's no sign of PD employees or SCE employees responding to any threads or posts
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GT Blog: Honestly this blog has one update in October 2009 when GT
SP came out.
So that about sums up the GT website. My GT5 home is really just GT Life on the web so it doesn't offer much news or information about upcoming events, DLC, updates, that sort of thing.
Now let's take a look at Forza's website:
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Main Page: Contains some rather interesting stuff like Week in Review, Top Gear Tuesday, and car reveals from the upcoming Forza 4 game.
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News: Pretty much a blog that's just the archive of what's on the main page.
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Media: Cool little videos and pictures that seem update oftenly. NOT GT-TV that has little to do with GT5
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Community: The meat of the website really. On every forum you can always spot a Community Manager posting, replying to threads, answering questions, etc. Community involvement from T10 is very apparent
Just by looking at these websites it's immediately noticeable that T10 communicates with the fans while PD doesn't, and that makes me extremely sad. I've loved the GT series since before I was old enough to drive, and I'll always love it, but it makes me really sad that a company that doesn't have the history, and arguably a smaller fan base, is more engaged in its community.
To me at least it seems like PD either doesn't care about what their fans thing, or they just don't care enough to even find out. And honestly hiring 10 more employees to become Community Managers wouldn't hurt.
The fact of the matter is PD is a Japanese Game Company, and is still doing things the old japanese way. Like someone said earlier, if you've played the FF series, the RE series, or any other Japanese game from a respected company you'd know their customer interaction is horrible. This has to change. I've read dozens of articles from game devs, journalists, and fans that all complain about how Japanese game companies are stuck in the past and need to get themselves up to date.
I just hope PD will at some point realize this and act on it.