Maybe it's the vocal minority who loves the tedious single player that have won this round.
This specific vocal minority is one of the strangest/funniest parts of reading this forum to me. The majority of people here seem to be under the impression that playing a single player game regularly for like a year straight is a normal thing that more than 0.1% of people do.
People buy games and don't even play them. All the time. GT sport had a trophy for driving 100km, which should be less than an hour of play time, and
only 59% of players have it. 41% of people who bought the game didn't even play it for an hour! And this is the common across all games.
Those who do actually play the game they bought will play the single player for a week or two. Maybe a couple months if it's long and they really enjoy it. Then they move to online (if the game has one) or they move on to a different game.
This idea that GT7 having "only" a 25 hour single player means that the series is doomed and PD is gonna just give up on it and ghost us is... laughably ridiculous. You know what other games had a similar single player length? God of War. Spiderman Miles Morales. The Last of Us Part 2. Grand Theft Auto V. It's a real who's who of unsuccessful video games 🙄
Now am I saying that GT7's single player is anywhere as good as those? Of course not. But "it's too short" is not in the top 10 list of the reasons why. In an alternate timeline where this game released with 400 hours of single player content, the difference in active player count today between that timeline and our reality would be a rounding error.
To be absolutely clear, none of that is in any way an excuse or a justification or a defense of PD. There are a
plethora of issues with this game, not least of which are the many very strange decisions that PD made with the single player. It's also not to disparage people who enjoy single player. I like it too, especially license tests and missions, and I have thousands of hours in single player going back to GT3. It's just weird to me to see people say things like "only a small fraction of players care about sport mode and esports stuff" and then turn around and act like 90% of the people who bought this game want to spend the next 3 years playing through 300 hours of AI races and collecting every single car in the game. It's very much a pot-kettle-black situation that's extremely widespread around here.