Gran Turismo Sport

» see gran-turismo.com/gtsport as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

It came out on 17 October 2017 in North America and two days later in Japan, and Polyphony Digital did not present it as the next number in the series. Gran Turismo Sport was pitched as a competition platform. The headline was a partnership with the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile, which runs Formula One and had never before attached its name to a console game. Two championships ran inside it under FIA supervision, the Nations Cup for individual drivers and the Manufacturers Cup for factory teams, and the winners were handed trophies at the FIA prize gala alongside the real drivers.

To keep that credible, Polyphony made a decision that defined the game more than any of the cars did. Your progress only saved when you were connected to their servers. The reasoning was anti-cheat, since a save editor on a local file makes a leaderboard meaningless, and the reasoning was sound. The consequence was that a single-player racing game bought on a disc would not record a single lap if the house internet dropped.

People noticed immediately. On 22 December 2017 patch 1.10 arrived with GT League, which was the conventional offline career mode the game had shipped without, plus fifteen cars. It did not remove the connection requirement. It just gave players something recognizable to do while connected.

None of that hurt it commercially. Final figures put it at 12.977 million copies and about $355 million in revenue, with roughly 7.5 million people logged in at some point by December 2018. It is one of the best selling PS4 games Sony ever published, and it spent its whole life explaining itself.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the servers were holding ~

Sport Mode, the ranked racing that was the entire premise, obviously. Beyond that: driver rating and sportsmanship rating, plus the penalty system that made those two numbers mean anything. Open Lobby and Quick Match went with them. So did Seasonal Events and the Discover section where players shared liveries and photos. The livery editor was one of the deepest tools Polyphony ever built and it stored everything remotely, so on the day the servers went down every car wearing a downloaded design reverted to factory paint.

I was thirty three when this came out and I have never owned a PlayStation 4. Console racing sims sit in a part of the hobby I never went into, and the honest reason is that the machine I have always cared about is the one I can open. What kept me reading about Gran Turismo Sport was the engineering argument underneath it, because making the save authoritative on the server is a defensible call, and the server is also a cost line that somebody eventually deletes.

~ the wind-down ~

The wind-down ran in three steps. Downloadable content came off the PlayStation Store on 1 December 2023, so anyone who had not bought it by then never would. The game itself was delisted on 1 January 2024. The online services stopped at 06:00 UTC on 31 January 2024, six years and three months after launch, with Gran Turismo 7 already two years old and carrying the FIA championships forward.

~ patch 1.69 ~

On the same day the servers stopped, Polyphony released one last update for a game nobody could buy anymore. Patch 1.69 removed the always-online requirement. Progress saves to the console now. The offline events still run and the cars you own stay owned, and the design decision that made Gran Turismo Sport an argument for six years was deleted in a patch note on the day it stopped mattering.

It is a decent ending, and it only exists because somebody at Polyphony wrote the code for a title with no revenue left in it. Plenty of always-online games do not get that. The ones that do not get it stop being games and become discs.

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