Gran Turismo 7 is an excellent racing sim bogged down by microtransactions. Yet, instead of dialling back on that bit of the game, a recent update sees developer Polyphony Digital make progression even more grindy. Now, some players are turning to a new remote play exploit to farm millions of credits while not even playing the game.
All cars in GT7 can be bought for credits. Players can either earn credits by playing the game, or buy them outright, starting at $US2.50 ($3) for 100,000 credits. Cars at the pricier end of the spectrum can cost 2,000,000 credits, which works out to roughly $US20 ($28) in cash for those who want to skip the grind. But one player seems to have found a way to bypass this system, and others are following suit.
A player named Septomor over on the PSNProfiles forum (via VGC) developed a script that runs on PC to grind races for you. GT7 is a PS4 and PS5 game, but players can play it on PC using the Remote Play feature. The script runs races on particular settings to require minimal input, resulting in AFK farming for up to roughly 650,000 credits per hour. That’s about 15 million credits per day, or $US150 ($208) worth of GT7 microtransactions, more than double the price of the game alone on PS4.
“Used it all night, it farmed a little over 5 mil in 10 hours. Had zero problems except the thoughts ‘What if my PC goes to sleep’,” wrote one player on the forum. “How ironic is this that the only method to get one of the high-end cars is to let an automatic script drive a sci-fi car around a fictional track? So much for The Real Driving Simulator.”
A GT7 player who goes by iLLmatic posted a how-to video on YouTube showing the exploit in action. Players have reported some issues, like setting up the script window overlay correctly, or getting past a menu, but when it gets going other players report the program appears to work as intended (Kotaku hasn’t yet tested it for ourselves).
The microtransaction grind isn’t the only point of controversy when it comes to GT7. Most of the game also requires an internet connection to play, even in single-player, supposedly to help cut down on cheating. When the game went down for maintenance earlier this week for over 24 hours, players were effectively locked out of their car collections, even if they paid real money for them. GT7 now has the lowest Metacritic user score of any first-party PlayStation game.
“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,” director and series creator Kazunori Yamauchi wrote in a blog post earlier this week. Some players certainly have found a way to avoid that, though probably not the way Yamauchi intended.
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