Gran Turismo 7 is now playable again. A weekly update, update 1.07, was rolled out which includes a scheduled server downtime of two hours, but it was extended to more than 24 hours.
The result is some very frustrated fans, which has now spilt out into a bigger conversation on the downsides of online-only games.
For context, Gran Turismo 7, like Gran Turismo Sport, is an online-only game. Game saves are tied to the game’s servers. So a server outage like this not only prevents access to multiplayer games but access to almost every component of the game. You are only allowed to do some arcade races and the Music Rally mode. And you can’t earn credits from playing offline either.
What became a bigger issue is that update 1.07 also brings some changes to the credits payout for races. This sees a few races getting better rewards to match their difficulty and length, but a lot more races, some of which have been what players have been playing repeatedly to farm in-game money, have their payouts nerfed. Gran Turismo 7 also has micro-transactions.
The game is now live with update 1.08. In response to the game outage, and the recent outrage, series producer Kazunori Yamauchi offers a response to what happened with the update.
“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,” he explained. “This is the reason for the delay. My sincere apologies for the late report to everyone.”
Yamauchi also further explain in regards to the nerfing of race event rewards.
“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.”
Yamauchi promises there will be plans to add more race events, new content and additional features to further address this problem.
GT Sport had its few server issues back when it was first released, but that was before the addition of micro-transactions, and the game was very generous with giving away cars (you can get a free car every day by just doing your daily driving milestone).
With GT7, micro-transactions are built-in at launch, and because of the high prices of cars and the aspect of collecting said cars becoming the big goal of the game, buying cars can be impossible without spending a ridiculous amount of time grinding, or a ridiculous amount of money in micro-transactions.
Plus, the daily driving milestone rewards have been watered down to include different rewards, some of them are just chump change of 5,000 credits. For comparison, the cheapest of used cars can be around the 40,000 credits range, with the more desirable classic cars being worth a couple of millions of credits.
It’s an unfortunate event, that will definitely drive away new players, especially those that never liked the idea of an online-only single-player game. And it will need a years of consistent in-game updates to win back the goodwill that was flushed down by this one incident.
Despite this one glaring flaw in that GT7 is a live service game, this is the best Gran Turismo game in decades. You can read more on what we thought of the game in our review here.