Sony Addresses Troubled Gran Turismo 7 Launch, Gives Angry Fans One Million Free Credits

bbsguru writes: Sony/PlayStation has been taking a lot of heat for making the new Gran Turismo 7 more dependent on microtransactions. Gamers say the well-reviewed game had taken advantage of those reviews by waiting until after it was released to jack up the cost of playing the game. Acceptance wasn't improved by the more-than-a-day outage that accompanied the changes. [To make matters worse, Gran Turismo 7 owners weren't even able to play single player because the DRM servers that require an online check to play the game went down.] After several tentative responses, Sony is [finally] paying out, "gifting players with a million in-game credits and outlining the near-term updates for Gran Turismo 7 that will address the problems," writes Eurogamer's Martin Robinson. "We want to thank you for your continued patience and valuable feedback as we grow and evolve GT7 to make it as enjoyable and rewarding for as many players as possible," wrote series creator Kazunori Yamauchi in a blog post. "We always want to keep communication lines open with our community so that we can work together to build the best racing experience possible."

Uh, what?

[msauve]

"a million in-game credits"

So, something which costs them exactly nothing. And something only a stupid MF thinks has value. PT Barnum was right.

Re:

[Calydor]

Next patch notes: Starting the game now costs 100,000 credits.

Re:

[pezpunk]

well, one of the primary complaints is that it's far too difficult to earn in-game credits (thus pushing people to buy them from Sony's online store), and that after all the positive reviews came in, they reduced the payouts of a bunch of races, making it even harder to earn credits, and turning car collecting into a much longer grind than any previous iteration of the game (also, you can't sell your cars). So this does address one of the main complaints.

of course a one-time payoff isn't really a solution,

"Troubled"? More like "botched"....

[gweihir]

And botched because of greed.
Why is it that some companies, when they screw up, get reporting that implies that they are not fully responsible for what happened?

Re:

[UnknownSoldier]

Indeed. I made a list [slashdot.org] of the numerous problems the game has. Adding MTX after the embargo review lifted was one of the worst shenanigans Sony pulled.

Re:

[gweihir]

That is an impressive list! How anybody at Sony thought they could get away with it is interesting. Maybe the focus-tested on clueless morons.

Meanwhile Angry fans

[rsilvergun]

Are using a script to farm credits [playstationlifestyle.net] and skip the grind.

Amazing

[dohzer]

Wow. And I thought FH5's launch was bad.