As the curtain drops on another exciting season of the Gran Turismo World Series, Polyphony Digital is already looking forward to a bigger and better 2023.
Like so many other things, the GT World Series was badly affected by global events across 2020 and 2021. Having originally planned for at least five “World Tour” live events in 2020, only one took place — in Sydney in February 2020.
Since then all of the competition has been online, including three rounds of this year’s championship, until the Showdown in August and of course this weekend’s live final in Monaco — the first in three years.
Speaking in a round-table media interview, GT series creator Kazunori Yamauchi commented: “At that 2020 Sydney event, the scale of our World Tour events were around equal in scale to Formula E at the time, in terms of viewerships”.
With the live events no longer possible, that’s dwindled. Yamauchi adds: “Having not been able to do live events after that viewership has dropped and we are restarting this here now. We were really glad to have been able to restart events like this, but you can say that we have lost some of that momentum that we had been building up from 2018 and 2019”.
PD is looking to recapture the interest of those earlier seasons by expanding back to the World Tour’s former glory. “We used to host 6 events throughout the year, but this year now we have done two. So next year I would really like to see that we can do a bigger restart of the series”, says Yamauchi.
While not able to share any details just yet, the return to a six-event calendar could bring former venues such as New York, Tokyo, Paris, Madrid, Nurburgring, and Sydney back onto the schedule, with other new locations also possibly under consideration.
It’s not just about the raw viewer figures either, with Yamauchi again keen to express how important it is for the GT community to have these events as social focus points. “These live events are somewhere where the family of Gran Turismo can reconvene with all of the top players and all the people involved, such as the media and everyone” he adds.
As things stand then, the 2023 Gran Turismo World Series could be the biggest yet!
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