It's been a pretty lousy week for Gran Turismo 7. The game lost some sales numbers to WWE 2K22, which was released and followed with considerable controversy. Gran Turismo 7 went offline for 30hours and was unplayable during that time. It was all because of an update that didn't work out as planned.
The update saw Gran Turismo 7 lower its in-game currency payouts for completing races and force players to buy in-game currency with real-world money.
The update led to a total revolt by players and even led to players' review bombing the game on Metacritic, bringing it down to a 1.9 user rating. The moves and controversy forced producer Kazunori Yamauchi to release an apology.
"I wanted to explain what happened in this update. Immediately before the release of the 1.07 update, we discovered an issue where the game would not start properly in some cases on product versions for the PS4™ and PS5™.
This was a rare issue that was not seen during tests on the development hardware or the QA sessions prior to the release, but in order to prioritize the safety of the save data of the users, we decided to interrupt the release of the 1.07 update, and to make a 1.08 correctional update.
This is the reason for the delay. My sincere apologies for the late report to everyone. Also in this update, some event rewards have been adjusted. I wanted to also explain the reasons for it and our plans going forward. 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 in 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."
What do you think of Yamauchi's statement?
