President of Polyphony Digital and father of the Gran Turismo series Kazunori Yamauchi has taken to the PlayStation Blog to apologize to Gran Turismo 7 players. The apology comes after changes to the game that were made last week. In last week’s 1.07 patch the in-game earnings for many races were adjusted down. The result was that players who were already struggling to pay for expensive cars in the game were now at an even greater disadvantage. Players were outraged and review bombed the game on Metacritic. It quickly became the worst-rated game in the series based on user reviews.
Players were angry that Polyphony Digital seemed to be trying to force them towards microtransactions in what is already an expensive $70 title. To make matters worse, the game went offline for nearly two days as a result of the patch. Further angering players as Gran Turismo 7, despite being a largely single-player game, is online only. Today’s apology from Yamauchi comes with a promise to fix things for players over the next month. All players who were affected by the outage will also receive 1 million credits if they played the game before March 25. To get the credits players just need to open the game before April 25.
Along with his apology and 1 million credit gift to players, Yamauchi laid out the following updates which will come into effect at the beginning of April. Improvements that should, Polyphony Digital hopes, appease fans of the series who have been frustrated with the latest game.
- 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.
Further improvements that don’t have a specific release date yet were also divulged.
- Increase the payout value of limited time rewards as we develop as a live service.
- Further World Circuit event additions.
- Addition of Endurance Races to Missions including 24-hour races.
- Addition of Online Time Trials and awarding of rewards according to the player’s difference with the top ranked time.
- Make it so cars can be sold.
Whether the apology and aforementioned improvements placate Gran Turismo 7 owners remains to be seen.
