Following one of the most difficult days in the 25-year history of Gran Turismo, series founder Kazunori Yamauchi has released a statement to fans regarding the future of Gran Turismo 7 — just two weeks into the title’s life.
The letter from Yamauchi firstly addresses the 34-hour period where the game, which requires a permanent internet connection to access the overwhelming majority of the features, was unavailable due to server maintenance.
This was caused by a previously undetected issue with the v1.07 update which could render the game inoperable, so PD took steps to prevent its deployment until the patch to fix it arrived earlier today.
However, the larger part of the statement covered one of the major talking points for the earlier update, which saw payouts for the best-earning races in the game slashed.
That prompted significant backlash from the fans, including GT World Tour drivers and community voices, and accusations that players were being pushed towards expensive microtransactions in order to fulfill GT7’s apparent goal of collecting cars. The title was also heavily “review-bombed” on review aggregator sites, for the second time in three weeks.
Yamauchi addressed both aspects of this via a special statement made on the official Gran Turismo website.
The GT series creator states that he would like to avoid a situation where players are “mechanically … replaying certain events over and over again” (also known as “grinding”) and would like players to enjoy the game “even without microtransactions”.
Yamauchi goes on to say that the planned game updates which will bring more content, missions, races, events, and features to “constructively resolve” the perceived necessity of grinding in the game as it stands.
That suggests that the initial, small group of events available in GT7 was intended to be a short-term starting point to account for the first 39 Menu Books in GT Cafe — even if some of the most expensive cars in the game are already available (and may get more expensive).
In the final part of the statement, Yamauchi adds that he wishes he could share more, and that he’d like people to “watch over the growth of Gran Turismo 7 from a somewhat longer term point of view”.
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