Uh oh. Gran Turismo 7 gets another update this week. Update 1.07 continues to address some issues and fixes bugs to the newly released racing game, but it has also riled up its fans for some very unpopular changes.
The fixes (including the wrong tyre compound available in license tests and mission challenges) are all good. A Streamer Mode (Broadcast Mode as it’s called here) is now available that disables music that can trigger copyright claims.
But what’s making the fanbase upset is the changes to the credits payout for the available races, which took a turn for the worse.
18 different races have their rewards adjusted “according to driving time and difficulty”. But the result is that most races have their payouts cut down.
Worse of all, for the game updates to happen, GT7 servers have to be brought down for maintenance. Usually, it’s only two hours long, but this update had some issues which have extended the maintenance window.
GT7 players not only cannot access the multiplayer aspects during this time, but you are also limited to only a handful of arcade races and the Music Rally mode until servers are up.
At the time of writing, the servers have yet to be up and running. That’s one whole day of downtime.
The combination of nerfing payouts (which is likely so to push players into topping-up credits via microtransactions), how expensive it is to buy cars (some that are only in rotation for a limited time) as well as buy tuning parts, with very limited ways to gain credits at a decent rate (you also don’t get normal prize cars that can be sold for money as a farming method), plus the technical issues that prolonged the maintenance really set off a lot of negative comments and feedback, as seen on Twitter.
As much as we enjoyed Gran Turismo 7, we call it the best one in the series in decades, but the fact of the matter is that Gran Turismo 7 is a live service game. A single update can change the reception of the game by its fans, as you can see with what has happened with this.
Hopefully developers Polyphony Digital can take that into consideration and maybe not be that stingy with the game’s economy this early in the game’s life cycle. Get the fixes out but don’t ruin the players’ fun this early on.
You can read the patch notes for Update 1.07 here.