To be honest, I don’t really know how to write this feature without needing to have a look at both Gran Turismo’s past entry their main rival, Forza Motorsport because addressing the current Gran Turismo Sport issue without referencing past endeavours isn’t very ethical, at least that’s what my media professor says.
As stated in our post yesterday (at the time of writing), you can buy some of the GT Cars via the PS Store for around 4 to 11 Malaysian Ringgit (or 1-3 US Dollars in a regional equivalent) and already I see people on Twitter throwing their hands over this, screaming “GT IS DEAD” as the big bad “Microtransaction” has plagued their favourite Sim Racing series and we’re going to get more bad drivers on the track now, all the while forgetting that back in Gran Turismo 6, this was already a thing and was sort of addressed by Sony Interactive boss Shuhei Yoshida with this:
@Km2000gt read the posts, the game is just offering an alternative path to busy people. Read reviews when they come out.
— Shuhei BOT: Rescue Mission (@yosp) December 4, 2013
Remember when GT6 had Microtransaction in form of the ability to buy credits,which ruffle a lot of players into sworing off Gran Turismo and then forgotten about it a mere week later? It’s kinda like a feedback loop at this point.
Another thing that I can note is that yes, Forza 7 is backtracking hard on the lootboxes and even removing the Tokens system which you spend real money on buying cars quicker, but this come a good two years after the game has launched, gotten backlashes for it’s randomized crates and by the time they have balanced out the prizes which was said to be meager during the launch window in order to coax people to use crates/pay real money,it would have been 3 years since the game launches back in 2017 and people are going to focus on Forza 8 and Horzon 4 instead. So is it worth waiting for it though?
I mean, Forza 7 is a good racing game on its own but it had lost a lot of fans over this and I have a feeling GT Sport will (and probably has) fallen into this trap.
Frankly, I don’t approve of microtransaction just like the others and yes, Kaz-san did contradict himself with adding this into the game but as I recall, the prize money for winning races are still the same,along with the 150% Clean Race bonuses and all of the cars are still the same price pre-update. You still CAN grind on the Mission Experience, GT Leagues and Sports Mode,it’s not touched in anyway except the Daily Races becoming Weekly again. And besides, you can’t bring a Mercedes F1 car you bought into a GR.3 class race wilily-nilly, and you still need the driving skill to survive/win a race, something you can’t really buy..
In short, I am not defending Sony / Polyphony here, the sole reason why I had to write this up is because of me just wanting to highlight stuff that both parties have done before and not just do a half-ass response and connect it to their slow sales as some youtubers might have done before “rectifying” in the comments. Should Sony reconsider? Definitely. Will it stop Eager Mégane drivers punting you off track on the daily race? Nope. And as a fan returning to the series after a 10 year hiatus, it’s sad to see this riff on the community.
To close this then, Here’s how to make the PS Store prompt go away:
GT Icon > Settings > Brand Central > Turn Off PS Store Purchase.