Gran Turismo 7‘s v1.15 update has once again revised the prices on its rarest and most expensive cars.
When the game was released back in March, Sony made a lot of noise about Polyphony’s partnership with vehicle insurance company Hagerty. The idea, it was said, was that Hagerty would provide real-world economic modelling so that prices in the game’s Legend Cars dealership would be (comparatively) close to that of their real-life counterparts.
After digging into the patch notes, and datamining the game itself, a forum user on GTPlanet indicated that v1.15 would send 27 upward in price, and two down. Another 21 will remain unchanged.
Of the cars that went up, the Ferrari F40 might be the most eye-watering. The F40 nearly doubled in price, going from 1.34 million in-game credits to 2.6 million.
The months since launch have been bumpy for Gran Turismo 7, and Polyphony’s approach to its in-game economy is the root of all its problems. Two weeks after the game launched, Polyphony released a patch that drastically reduced the number of credits earned race-to-race. What was already a steep grind for currency became a sheer cliff face, in the obvious hope that players would simply buy credits with real money instead.
The pushback on this was severe enough that Polyphony ended up giving every player a million credits as a make-good. It then issued another patch that rebalanced the in-game economy entirely. After this, it became significantly easier to earn credits again. This latest patch has earned ire in Gran Turismo 7 fan spaces like GTPlanet and Reddit. Fans already view the move as a subtle backslide into the same kind of grind-heavy economy as before. Future updates will tell us if these players are right to be suspicious.
What seems abundantly clear at this point is that Gran Turismo 7‘s insistence on assigning real-world value to make-believe cars has become a boondoggle. It’s the kind of decision that would have made total sense in theory, within the Polyphony offices. In practice, it’s left a great racing sim in the mud, its tyres spinning uselessly as it attempts to reverse out of an embarrassing, self-inflicted predicament.
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