Gran Turismo 7 Offers Massive Apology For Messy Launch
These are usually followed by official statements disclosing potential issues and, most importantly, revealing significant changes that might’ve happened. But this wasn’t the case with Gran Turismo 7.
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Is it just us, or has anyone else noticed that gaming companies like CD Projekt RED, Electronic Arts, Rockstar Games, and others have been issuing apologies left and right lately? The laws of supply and demand dictate that the abundance of one product on the market lowers its value, which only begs the following question: are those apologies even worth the air used to voice them? Gran Turismo 7 developer is now offering a massive apology for a messy launch.
Polyphony Digital is the latest gaming company to join the “We’re Sorry Team” and offers 1 million credits to each Gran Turismo 7 player as compensation for the last week’s server outage. As reported by Kotaku, the Gran Turismo 7 director Kazunori Yamauchi acknowledged frustrations with the state of the game, announced a 1 million credits compensations, and promised dramatic changes to the live-service game’s car economy and microtransactions.
For those unfamiliar with the situation, Gran Turismo 7 servers went down for scheduled maintenance on March 17 and didn’t come back until over a day later. This wouldn’t be an issue if the game — much of which is single-player — wasn’t a live service. Unfortunately, this means that the game remains connected to its servers, despite running in single-player mode (which usually runs locally), and the outage locked out most of its content for an extended period.
Let’s be reasonable; accidents happen, and this isn’t an isolated case in which maintenance went awry and servers weren’t online according to schedule. In such cases, the companies behind live-service games usually issue written apologies using Twitter, which was recently the case with Elden Ring and the PlayStation update. These are usually followed by official statements disclosing potential issues and, most importantly, revealing significant changes that might’ve happened. But this wasn’t the case with Gran Turismo 7.
When the game came back online, players noticed some of its modes weren’t rewarding players with the same number of credits, Gran Turismo 7’s in-game currency, as they were expecting. The previously deployed patch, known as “the day when Gran Turismo 7 failed to show for school”, was supposed to address the inconsistent credits payout within World Circuit Events mode. Unfortunately, it required the recalculation and re-implementation of the game’s entire reward system, something which Polyphony Digital failed to mention to its customers.
In the end, Polyphony Digital offered 1 million credits to all players affected by the server blackout as a recompense for their sinister ways. The company also stated that several patches would be rolled out in the following months to add more content to Gran Turismo 7 and make grinding for credits less of a soul-crushing chore. But would the company have done so if the game wasn’t previously review-bombed due to the server outage?
And why aren’t we able to play single-player games we paid for with money, earned by the sweat of our brows, whenever we desire? Have single-player games become a subscription service too?
