The past 48 hours have been an absolutely disaster for Polyphony Digital and their recently released racing title Gran Turismo 7. Servers were down for 30 hours with many not being able to play the game thanks to the title needing to always be connected to the internet. Players who were able to access a majority of the game were quick to notice that many race payouts were nerfed with some seeing a decrease in credit payouts by over 50%. This led to even more speculation that the company were trying to force microtransactions on gamers way more that what they had done with its previous entry Gran Turismo Sport.
As part of a statement addressing the outages, Polyphony Digital CEO Kazunori Yamauchi said this was done to reflect the prices of the cars in the real world and that upcoming plans would “constructively” resolve this issue. Yamauchi stated:
In GT7 I would like to have users enjoy lots of cars and races even without microtransactions.
At the same time the pricing of cars is an important element that conveys their value and rarity, so I do think it’s important for it to be linked with the real world prices.
I want to make GT7 a game in which you can enjoy a variety of cars lots of different ways, and if possible would like to try to avoid a situation where a player must mechanically keep replaying certain events over and over again.We will in time let you know the update plans for additional content, additional race events and additional features that will constructively resolve this.
It pains me that I can’t explain the details regarding this at this moment, but we plan on continuing to revise GT7 so that as many players as possible can enjoy the game.
We would really appreciate it if everyone could watch over the growth of Gran Turismo 7 from a somewhat longer term point of view.
