There's some really cool thoughts in this interview. What I caught from it is that the company is reaching it's limits in sales. A lot of companies are based on constant growth, so reaching a limit is considered disastrous. A lot of companies are like this which is why they get into ESG, and other bad funding schemes to 'grow'.
There is now a push for sim tech for the game that goes beyond $1,000. Even the game creators think this is bad because the average gamer can't afford this. A lot of people are trying to lessen the sales, but have those sales make a lot more. The modern pinball scene is like this.
Then we have cost of creation where all the scanning and technical work to remake the car in game is taking longer. It can take the majority of a year for a single car, and people want 1,000+ cars. The slow introduction of cars means it's a better game 3 years from now and cheaper.
The company needs to expand, but they are reaching their limits. I would love a GT Horizons game, but I don't know if the company can make it.
Polyphony can't even make a good gran turismo anymore, what makes you think they could make a good offshoot?
GT7 has a bunch of fundamental issues still present in the game almost a year after its launch.
I've been playing 6 still. It scratches the itch perfectly. I don't have a PS5 so 7 is right out for me.
I know, I'm giving it the three year wait first.
Better that way.
The online lobbies are a mess, servers are iffy, the penalty system is an insult to humanity, the car physics are wonky, the car balance is more or less entirely absent, and basic functions are missing.
And by "basic", I mean this is a title meant to have an esports aspect, but there is no spectator slot.
The main issue with GT7 is that it's not that long. I know people who finished the whole thing in a week after release.
The list of issues with that game is significantly longer than just "not enough content". To name a few off the top of my head:
The AI sucks. They're slow, won't react to the player and act in a completely braindead manner. They also rubberband like crazy.
Offline races are all set up as rolling starts, often with ludicrous gaps to the first AI. You cannot have close racing in this game if you want to win these races, you need to pick something OP.
Actually there are no offline races because the game is always online.
There is only one "endurance" race with repeating prize money and even that one's just 1 hour.
No B-Spec mode at all.
Grinding money is even less fun than in previous titles - so much so that people wrote scripts using autohotkey and remoteplay.
Split screen mode didn't work at launch - still doesn't work.
Lobbies and connections are unstable.
Lobbies still only have 16 slots.
Lobbies don't have a separate spectator slot.
Even if you take a player slot to spectate, the spectator options and UI are extremely limited.
Car balancing in "BoP" is absolute ass.
Car physics for MR cars is broken.
Tuning is broken.
Tuning parts locked behind daily "tickets".
No way to increase the tank size of road cars - except by swapping in a race car engine (from one of those lottery tickets).
The PP system is broken. As a matter of fact, it's so bad they removed all suspension setup changes from PP calculations because it was a buggy mess and people kept finding glitches to enter absurdly powerful cars into PP-restricted races.
You don't need endless growth.
You need to be in the black.
Shareholders are the worst thing that can happen to a company.
That's very true, but the ability to make new content make it to black has been higher and higher. I remember all the businesses that went under during the PS3 era because of this.
Can this bubble burst already?
The sports TV rights bubble is bursting right now.
Can the inflated game dev cost bubble please burst soon, so we can get back to limitations breeding creativity?
There are two factors here. The first is most of these games are big budget to fit the power of the console. If it doesn't look amazing -subjectivley- then it's not going to get funded or helped by Sony or MSoft.
The other is the bureaucracy within the endeavor. Kingdome Come Deliverance creators pointed out that a lot of companies spend the money and man power because they're scared of doing it wrong. If there was a team of people who could do the job well, then the team would be much smaller. The type of company built around the idea would also be a different size. KC had a smaller team and made a profit from it.
This is where Nintendo shines. They don't need or want the shiniest graphics, they want the best ones. They have a tone of indie games that make a profit off of the small team and creation time. The bigger companies are trying to prove their worth by making large team games, that need to make 10 million sold or it's in the red.
It's not even shiny graphics these days. Look at Unreal Engine 5 -- any halfway competent artist can generate a photorealistic sci-fi scene in a matter of hours that looks on par to the shiniest graphics available in a top AAA game.
In Gran Turismo's case, if they're spending one year going through a LiDAR implementation of a car then they're doing something wrong when the devs at Assetto Corso are able to generate content much faster and with much higher scalability than Polyphony. You can see how even with a few post-processing mods and the default cars, Assetto looks on par/better than Gran Turismo: https://youtu.be/TkaO3h__EG8?t=134
And they didn't need bloated budgets to do so. A lot of the big AAA publishing industry is suffering more from your middle paragraph than finances. There are a lot of ways to cut corners financially and still make great looking games, like Bright Memory comes to mind, which was made by one guy.
But when Sony is killing sequels to games like Days Gone because it starred a straight white male, it kind of says everything that needs to be said about how the company is being run. BeamNG is another indie game that has WAY more realistic physics and moving parts than Gran Turismo -- granted it's not on the same level visually, but with a few mods it's definitely getting there -- but they aren't spending anywhere near as much on development and have a much smaller team, and have far better vehicular results (and the ability to make the cars as photorealistic as modders/modelers desire).
If Polyphony really wanted to cut costs and expand content they would add a track creator based on modular parts taken from photogrammetry, and focus on engaging content (career mode expansion, arcade mode challenges, rally mode challenges, etc., etc.) rather than redoing already photorealistic cars from scratch again (were the cars from Gran Turismo Sport that unrealistic looking that they needed to redo them from scratch all over again?)
Just seems like a lot of development waste to justify exorbitant prices and MTX consumer gouging.
Asseto Corsa has more money than it let's on. The company that makes it has press days at major tracks with cars ready to drive. They like to claim small indie team, but it doesn't look that way.
I have it, and hope to play it with an improved computer and time. The game looks really nice for what I like.
I know less about BeamNG except that it isn't meant to be a racer like others. The mod scene has made some cool looking levels, and several cars. They have investors I believe, but I could just be misremembering it.
It's true, I could do a realistic racer just by a few clicks. Unreal 5 is amazing that way.
Sony needs the big company to excuse the big costs. I think even the GT creators hate it. Indies are needed to destroy this idea.