Gran Turismo 7 is finally getting some much-needed attention to its progression system. This has been one of the most common complaints about the sequel since it launched this month. In chasing after the always-online and constantly engaged racing sims like Forza, GT7 may have made a big mistake. Player progression in Gran Turismo 7 is built around constantly grinding out races and earning new cars. As well as constantly checking menus for new cars to buy. This isn’t fun, it’s tedious.
This idea was built around constant events and having to grind a fair bit to unlock cars and parts. That would be fine, if the game wasn’t so ridiculously over-tuned. It would seem that Polyphony Digital may have misjudged just how much time players would sink into the system. There’s only so much juice you can squeeze from a fruit, and the same applies to gamers. They will only trudge through your game for so long before you start to lose their interest.
But now, the developers have heard raucous complaints from the community over the game. “We know that this is not the Gran Turismo experience you expect and we will be making a goodwill gesture in the form of a non-paid credit pack of 1 million Cr. available to those players who may have been affected*,” they said in an update. Along with that comes immediate and planned changes to increase the amount of both events and rewards in the game.
The beginning of April will see the following changes being made to player progression in Gran Turismo 7:
- Increase rewards in the events in the latter half of the World Circuits by approximately 100% on average.
- Addition of high rewards for clearing the Circuit Experience in all Gold/All Bronze results.
- Increase of rewards in Online Races.
- Include a total of eight new one-hour Endurance Race events to Missions. These will also have higher reward settings.
- Increase the upper limit of non-paid credits in player wallets from 20M Cr. to 100M Cr.
- Increase the quantity of Used and Legend cars on offer at any given time.
But one question remains, is it too little, too late? There have been plenty of other genres in the sports vein that have run into this problem. 2K’s constant pushing of the player to grind for VC in NBA and WWE games is a clear way to manipulate the player into spending money. And the GT7 fanbase is clearly not having it. The company is also planning on increasing rewards for timed events, as well as adding new events to the rotation.
But, will players come back? The response being so immediate suggests a pretty noticeable drop in player numbers really soon after launch. Some drop is always normal, but this has likely been a massive drop-off. Since Sony likely won’t publish numbers, we have to infer what’s going on.
We already knew that GT7 was the top game by boxed sales alone in the UK in its first week on the market, with figures from industry data specialist GfK placing the title ahead of multi-platform title Elden Ring after just three days. Seeing such a drastic shift in the endgame grind suggests that a lot of people have quit the game already. This immediate response from the dev team suggests tens of thousands of gamers got frustrated with the progression within mere weeks of launch. That’s not a good sign for the long-term health of your game.