The just-released PlayStation-exclusive “Gran Turismo 7” has broken a record – but not the kind anyone wants to break.
The racing simulator game has reportedly snagged a user score of 2.5/10 from over 3,600 user reviews on Metacritic – the lowest score of any game in the review aggregate site’s nearly three decades of tracking games from PlayStation Studios and Sony Interactive Entertainment.
The all-time low user score comes despite a very strong 87/100 critics score on PlayStation 5. Indeed the game was released on March 4th, but the vast majority of these negative reviews were posted in the past week.
According to VGC, the reviews have come in the wake of a controversial software patch reducing payouts from the game’s races – making it harder to unlock new cars without microtransactions.
Even before that patch, there were complaints cars in the game cost as much as eight times what they did in the last title “Gran Turismo Sport” if purchased with real money. Others have done studies and found it could take players nearly twenty hours of grinding to afford enough to purchase just one of the most expensive of the game’s 425 car models available at launch.
Also not helping matters? The game’s servers went offline for more than 24 hours between the 17th and 18th – making it nearly unplayable due to a significant amount of content – even single-player content – requiring an internet connection to access.
Addressing the controversy over the patch, series boss Kazunori Yamauchi said via the game’s official site that the situation will be resolved with future content due to be released at an unspecified future date:
“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.”
The game has topped the sales charts in Europe for three consecutive weeks despite the controversy.
Source: VGC
