If you don’t want to win races, rack up Gran Turismo Credits, and purchase cars, you can now buy them instead.
Gran Turismo announced its July update for 2018 and among the laundry list of free updates is the return of microtransactions, a feature that hasn’t been seen since Gran Turismo 6. Check out the official announcement below!
Now, over 200 cars from GT Sport’s available cars will be available for purchase from the PlayStation Store and Brand Central as DLC.
“The Ability to Purchase Vehicles as DLC
• Many Gran Turismo users don’t have a lot of time to play and save in-game credits to acquire their favorite cars so we’ve made vehicles immediately available to purchase as DLC, allowing players with busy lives and those that are new to the world of GT to acquire attractive and competitive cars quickly and take their position on the starting grid
• Vehicles costing Cr. 2,000,000 or less can now be purchased directly through the PlayStation Store and Brand Central, in addition to standard in-game purchases
• All vehicles will remain available for purchase with in-game credits; no vehicles will be exclusively available through paid DLC
• This service start date will vary depending on the region
o July 30th – The Americas and Asia Regions
o August 2nd – Europe, Middle East, Africa and Oceania Regions”
As per IGN, back in August last year, fans of the game were reassured that microtransactions won’t be part of this game. Fans of Gran Turismo were still left with a bad taste in their mouths with the microtransaction debacle back in Gran Turismo 6. Some felt it was unfair that well to do videogamers could buy themselves into a very desirable car while everyone else had to race and acquire credits like normal videogamers.
It’s noteworthy that microtransactions aren’t mandatory and you can still race and acquire these cars the old-fashioned way.
This will be the seventh update of the game since its release at the end of December last year with plenty of free cars, tracks, and league events, so, to be fair, plenty of free content was released way before microtransactions were brought back.
It’s an interesting read through the comments on the video posted above. While a couple of people are genuinely upset that microtransactions are back, by and large, most are happy to just get something free.
Perhaps this is just the beginning of what will amount to a large opportunity to monetize wherever Gran Turismo can to take advantage of the truly lazy or privileged but then again, Gran Turismo has a long history of being loyal to their customer with great cars, realistic physics, and entertaining online gameplay.
While this is a tad worrisome just because I like my Gran Turismo to be as pure as possible with a level playing field for all, I won’t fret until I hear some real complaints and blatant cash grabs.
