Gran Turismo 7, offline for more than 24 hours, shows its always-online problem

polygon.com:

PlayStation owners who wanted to play Gran Turismo7 over the past day or so found themselves with little to do in the game, as the developer of the driving sim, Polyphony Digital, performed extended (and unexpected) maintenance. Players who dropped $69.99 or more on the game were understandably upset, both at the lack of communication from Sony and Polyphony, and how the always-online nature of some Gran Turismo 7 modes locked them out of much of the experience.

On Friday morning, Polyphony brought Gran Turismo 7 back online and rolled out a new update (version 1.08, effectively a fix for version 1.07) for GT7 and did its best to explain what happened. Kazunori Yamauchi, CEO of Polyphony Digital and producer of the Gran Turismo games, apologized to fans and said the more-than-24-hour downtime was related to a bug that prevented GT7 from starting on some PlayStation consoles.

“Immediately before the release of the 1.07 update, we discovered an issue where the game would not start properly in some cases on product versions for the PS4 and PS5,” Yamauchi wrote on the Gran Turismo website. “This was a rare issue that was not seen during tests on the development hardware or the QA sessions prior to the release, but in order to prioritize the safety of the save data of the users, we decided to interrupt the release of the 1.07 update, and to make a 1.08 correctional update.”

Gran Turismo 7 is now back online and playable, but the extended downtime for the game led to fans seeking refunds, a thrashing of the game’s Metracritic user score, and invitations from the competition — specifically Grid Legends developer Codemasters — to take a shot at Gran Turismo.

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