So I think it's sorta worth noting as an industry thing how fucked the GAAS MTX situation in GT7 is since Sony has generally not been a horrible MTX GAAS company and Sony has 10 GAAS games in the pipeline.
Basically the credit grind in GT7 is extremely slow compared to every other racer and even GT Sport and the cars cost more than ever and everything is designed for real money whale $$$ like a gacha game.
There's a short 10-15 hour campaign mode with a variety of events, license tests, missions which shower you with low-end normal cars and keeps you broke because you need to spend all your money tuning them to win races. This gets you about 100 of the 450 cars in the game.
After that you have to grind. Online races pay absolutely nothing. 4 hours of online racing pays like 200k credits which is real MTX money $2.50 USD, grinding SP racing pays about 200k/hour. The top cars can cost up to $20M which is like 40 hours of grinding for one car. Even in real MTX money that's like $150 for one car.
In GT Sport, you could just pay real USD money to buy the same car for like $2.50-$5.
The online mode is set up in a way that to be competitive you'll need an expensive car and tons of money to buy all the parts to tune it up or you'll be in last place. So basically encouraging whales spending hundreds of USD on top of a $70 game + PS+ yearly fee, just to race online.
All to unlock stuff, your "level" isn't tied to racing or winning races. It's a "collector's level" which levels up as you
buy more cars. Which is focused at making people want to spend more credits.
Additionally, some of the 450 cars, are hidden behind "invites" which you have to win in a roulette from grinding roulette tickets and then you get an invite to buy an expensive fancy car that is otherwise not available, but the kicker is the invite expires in 2 weeks so you have 2 weeks to come up with a ton of credits either from grinding for a dozen hours or paying like $20-$100 USD.
You also can't sell cars anymore for $$.
And the game is always online and like right now the servers are down so you can't even play the SP campaign or the game at all.
Now the extra scumminess of this all:
-When reviewers had the game for reviews and it got a bunch of 9s, MTX were disabled and the reviewers had no way of knowing how much real money, MTX market launched after reviews
-Yesterday they put out a patch and they halved the race payouts for the best races that people were using to grind credits. So instead of taking 20-40 hours to get a top-car, it's now 40-80 hours of grinding for the same car.
The backlash has already started and it will definitely get louder and louder as people finish up the short campaign and run into this grind. Will be interesting to see what Sony does. I remember Forza 5 or 6? had a similar issue though not as disgusting where it launched with tons of MTX and there was an uproar and eventually they went back on the whole thing. Will definitely be interesting to see if Sony is willing to back off and make the economy more reasonable.
If not, then expect future Sony games to be gacha city on top of $80 purchases.
It's just crazy that literally the same cars in GT7 cost like 10-40x more time and real money investment than they do in their previous game GT Sport which already had MTX. Like that is just fuckery right there.
I'm enjoying the SP campaign outside the AI being awful and ramming you non-stop, but once I beat the SP and see the credits I'm out. Will go back to Forza 7, Horizon 5 instead and maybe even jump back to GT Sport unless this is sorted out. This is going to absolutely kill the online in the game since most people won't be willing to be whales and will leave. Gonna be a dead online racing community quick at this rate, which may get them to change stuff.
Here's an article on it at launch before yesterday's nerf to payouts:
https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/gran-turismo-7s-microtransactions-are-live-and-gt-sports-5-cars-now-cost-40/
