The Real Greed Simulator

Another game has been ruined by the unfathomable greed rearing its ugly head in the industry. This time it's "The Real Driving Simulator," or Gran Turismo 7. So here's a short rant on how capitalism keeps on ruining every aspect of our lives.

Let me start by saying what has to be said; if you've bought Gran Turismo 7, even if you've bought the physical disc containing the game, just know that you do not own the game. What you paid for is only a license to play the game at the discretion of the publishers. This goes for any other game that requires you to log in to their online servers as well. For some games this makes sense, like multi-player online RPG's for example, where players roam an online virtual world, can band together with other players and so on. It could even make sense for the multi-player section of Gran Turismo 7. But the game requires a connection to the server even for the single-player career-mode, which makes no sense at all. This means that you'll only be able to play the game for as long as Sony keeps the servers online, and won't be able to play whenever the servers are down.

This happened when the game was updated to version 1.07, and players were not able to play for 30 hours. Sure, you can start a single-player game offline, but no progression of any kind will be saved; offline the game is nothing more than a glorified demo with no actual functionality whatsoever. So after 30 hours the functional version 1.08 went live, and oh boy did that open up a tsunami of criticism from disgruntled players. The patch severely decreased the amount of in-game credits that can be earned through playing and winning races, which is rightly recognized by most players as an attempt to lure gamers into buying these credits through micro-transactions. To be clear, previous versions of the game already had micro-transactions, but there are two especially egregious differences; the cars were significantly cheaper, and earning credits was significantly less difficult in previous games. Cars that cost $5 previously now will set you back $40.

Then there's the way these credit-packs are priced and stratified. Many cars will cost $3 million or $1 million credits, but you can only buy packs of 100K, 250K, 750K or 2M credits, meaning players will almost always over-spend and / or buy multiple packs. This is by design of course. In the Gran Turismo games you'll often receive the same car more than once, and the ability to sell redundant cars is also removed, taking away another means of earning credits through playing the game. This game costs 70 euros. One would assume this is enough to grant buyers access to the entirety of the game without being condemned to endless hours of grinding the same content over and over again, and ownership of the copy of the game. But no such luck; once again consumer satisfaction has been sacrificed on the altar of eternal growth and profit-maximization.

Linked below is another angry rant from a fan of the Gran Turismo games. Watch it for a couple more reasons why this is such a dick-move by the game's creators and publisher. I'd like to close with a reminder that this is exactly why I'm not overjoyed with the prospect of the introduction of NFT's in games or the metaverse. The latter seems just a way to make us pay for stuff in a virtual worlds, on top of making us pay for stuff in the real world. Just imagine, your avatar in the metaverse having to also pay for its copy of a game like GT7, and having to pay for micro-transactions in the virtual world... The law of profit-maximization and extracting every dollar possible makes it seem entirely possible that this will happen...

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