Featured Image Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment, Polyphony Digital
Topics: PlayStation, Sony
It’s been almost five years since the release of the last Gran Turismo game, but it's been even longer since the series was really considered to be at its best. Until now that is, with the release of Gran Turismo 7, which has been received super positively by critics. In his review, our very own Mark Foster said: “I’m thrilled to say that this is the best GT game I’ve played in the better half of a decade. It’s not without a few bumps in the road, but they’re nothing that will keep avid racers away. It serves as both a perfect first experience for new racers, and a welcome homecoming for those who have been away for a while.”
All sounds great, right? Well, not exactly. When the game went live on the PlayStation Store today, so did a bunch of microtransactions, and they’re chunky ones, to say the least. Instead of being able to just buy certain cars outright, like in Gran Turismo Sport, the only option players have is to buy packs of in game credits.
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As reported by VGC, for the smallest pack, which gives you 100,000 credits, will cost you $2.49 (£1.99), and the largest, at 2,000,000 credits, costs $19.99 (£15.99). Despite looking like big numbers on paper, as you’d imagine, the currency really doesn’t go very far.
Multiple cars can only be bought for around 3,000,000 credits, which, if you’re keeping up, is going to cost you just short of $40, or £32, depending on where you’re from. To spend so much money on a virtual car when you’ve already paid about $70 for a game is already wild, but it gets even worse when you compare the situation to the previous games in the series. One of the $40 cars, the Porsche 919 Hybrid 16, could be bought for $2.99 in Gran Turismo Sport, so it’s over 13 times more expensive. Yikes.
Of course, you can also grind these credits out yourself by competing in races, but oh what a grind it would be. Against AI, winning a top tier race can net you about 75,000 credits. When you consider that each race takes somewhere around 20-30 minutes, that means if you managed to win every single time, it’d take a minimum of about 13 hours to earn 3,000,000 credits. And, after all that, you could only afford one of the expensive cars. It’s not a great prospect.
Pricey microtransactions are obviously nothing new in games, but they do continue to be absolutely no fun for anyone, apart from the companies cashing in on virtual cars, of course.