Gran Turismo 7
Sony
Something extremely bad appears to have happened to PS4 and PS5’s Gran Turismo 7, the recently released racer, which was supposed to have a simple patch yesterday, but instead, it’s turned into more than 30 hours of downtime.
The game was supposed to be offline from just 6 AM to 8 AM UTC for patch 1.07, which was already controversial as it had elements to increase the grind of the game, which fans didn’t like. But now it’s been over 30 hours since that downtime started, and 22 hours since we heard anything from Gran Turismo 7 developers themselves about what’s going on. All they had to say was that they were extending maintenance on the patch. They “ask for patience” and “will notify everyone as soon as possible when this is likely to be completed.”
Again, that was 22 hours ago.
The other problem here is that the lack of online play great impacts the entirety of the game, including single player. Almost all of the game needs servers to function, so the only things you can do when the game is offline are World Circuits, Music Rally and AI races. But even that seems to have been heavily hamstrung by the outage, as it’s barely playable in that regard as well:
The “solution” to get the limited single player mode to work appear to be to turn off internet on your PlayStation altogether, but this is a pretty unacceptable situation all-around, as is the almost total lack of communication from the developers themselves about what’s going on. Games don’t just go down for 30+ hours, and if they do, they need more than a singular update about what’s happening 24 hours ago. As such, some players are attempting to get refunds, and it’s a little hard to blame them.
Gran Turismo 7 is far from the only game to rely heavily on online servers, even for single player content, but this shows the risk of our new online-connected gaming landscape where there is increasingly no such thing as true single player for many games, whether or not you own a disc. When things go bad, they go really bad, and now GT7 players are concerned about their save states when the game comes back online, while others are demanding some sort of compensation for such a lengthy outage.
We will see when this gets resolved, as with many players waking up this morning, there has to be some sort of update issued from the team, if not an actual fix to get the game back online. And it would be great to know exactly what happened here, and how they’ll try to avoid another massive outage like this in the future.
Update: The game is now back online, and a blog post has been published about the issue and the changes in the patch itself:
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