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.
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.