Gran Turismo was once the king of console sim style racing games, and arguably the racing genre as a whole. It has sold almost 100 million copies across its various iterations and is known for offering incredible graphical fidelity and attention to details related to cars and stuff surrounding them.
It was also largely absent from the PS4 generation, even though the one release it did have, a non-numbered stripped down version called Gran Turismo Sport, sold millions of copies even though it was non-numbered and stripped down.
Gran Turismo 7 is still in active development and announced for PS5 so the series is still active, but almost missing a whole console generation, during which the Forza series put out a mainline game every 2 years and a Horizon game on alternate years, just seems insane to me. Gran Turismo 7 was supposed to be a PS4 game but it just kind of got quietly delayed off the console over a period of time. On the one hand it's clear that what's going on is they're making another Gran Turismo game, but it's unclear why it's taking so incredibly long and why there's virtually no buzz or discussion around it.
Now obviously the Gran Turismo series has never released as frequently as Forza, but it's been a pretty active series since its inception. Even though there was a 6 year gap between Gran Turismo 4 and Gran Turismo 5 there were 3 smaller Gran Turismo projects released during that time period so the franchise was still around. The PS4 is the first Playstation console (other than the Vita) with minimal GT support and it doesn't look like GT 7 is going to be an early PS5 game.
Is the series just not a priority for Sony anymore? Is Polyphony Digital just a dysfunctional developer that's too obsessed with getting details right so that they can't put out games at a reasonable clip? Is GT 7 going to redefine racing games the way the first Gran Turismo game did so those things take time?
I just don't get what's going on. Gran Turismo Sport was an okay game, but it wasn't a huge Gran Turismo experience of the kind I actually want, but I also don't see a lot of people talking about the series anymore. It's not considered a key Sony property, which is strange for me considering that when the games do come out they sell high 7 to low 8 figure digits in games. They have a massive fan base.
Does anyone know what's going on with the series? Does anyone care?
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