Players couldn’t play Gran Turismo 7 at all for more than 24 hours because of maintenance. Polyphony Digital announced that the maintenance was extended due to an issue found in the game’s next update, 1.07. Gran Turismo 7 needs to be connected to the internet to play single-player modes like the campaign and GT Cafe as well as most other features. The extended maintenance and other issues that players have with the game caused criticism from the community. The game has since come back online and Polyphony Digital CEO Kazunori Yamauchi has issued an apology and explained more in detail what the problem was.
On Reddit, many users and Gran Turismo 7 players talked about how they are unhappy with the maintenance, the credit reduction, progression nerfs, and the lack of communication from Polyphony Digital on social media.
“I wanted to explain what happened in this update. Immediately before the release of the 1.07 update, we discovered an issue where the game would not start properly in some cases on product versions for the PS4 and PS5,” Yamauchi said. “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. This is the reason for the delay. My sincere apologies for the late report to everyone.”
Yamauchi also revealed that some event rewards have been adjusted and addressed microtransactions in the game. He said, “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. We will in time let you know the update plans for additional content, additional race events and additional features that will constructively resolve this.
It pains me that I can’t explain the details regarding this at this moment, but we plan on continuing to revise GT7 so that as many players as possible can enjoy the game. We would really appreciate it if everyone could watch over the growth of Gran Turismo 7 from a somewhat longer term point of view.