Gran Turismo, Pay-to-play on the PS3... up to $845

[seenew]

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/733/733760p1.html

September 20, 2006 - According to a post at Beyond3D an interview with Kazunori Yamauchi about the new Gran Turismo on PS3 in the latest issue of Famitsu has more details on microtransactions in the game.


According to the article, shortly after PlayStation 3's launch there will be two versions of the new Gran Turismo HD, both have online multiplayer. Gran Turismo 5 will not arrive until 2008.

Gran Turismo HD: Premium is a GT5 prologue that comes with two courses and 30 cars. Gran Turismo HD: Classic has no cars or courses and is meant to be a platform for the online multiplayer, which according to this report supports up to 20 cars in a race.

Up to 750 cars and 50 tracks will be available for purchase. The cars are reportedly 50 - 100 yen (approx. $0.43 - 0.85) and courses are 200 - 500 yen (approx. $1.71 - 4.26). You will not get cars via in game events, only by purchasing and downloading. Apparently, there are also plans to release limited numbers of downloads for special courses.

IGN contacted Sony who would not comment at this time. Does this mean that to own all the cars and courses in GT HD a PS3 owner would have to drop up $500-845 bucks on Gran Turismo? What if you don't download all the courses, but your friend does? Can you not race on that track unless you buy it? Hopefully, these questions can be answered later this week at Sony's Press Conference from the Tokyo Game Show.

http://ps3.ign.com/articles/733/733760p1.html

[sikkinixx]

old news my friend.

According to IGN, the game might be dirty cheap to begin with

"Bummed about Sony's micro transaction plans for Gran Turismo HD? Well this news might soften the blow just a bit. Japan's Impress Watch games site reports that, in comments made to the Japanese press, series producer Kazunori Yamauchi revealed that Sony plans to make GT HD available for the cost of the game disk and instruction manual. This suggests a retail price point of just a few dollars for the first PS3 Gran Turismo game."
http://ps3.ign.com/articles/734/734935p1.html

so while paying for it still sucks, at the very least you won't be paying full retail for it then expected to drop more cash on cars/tracks. And they are adding car damage via online patch in 07 :cool:

[Tommyg117]

I still think this is a bad idea on Sony's part. Maybe it's a good idea with microtransactions, but a bad idea in that they are expensive. To get the whole game, you will have to pay some pretty big cash. I'm glad I never got into Gran Turismo.

[sikkinixx]

maybe if they had made it like $1 for 10 cars and a track or something, or $1 for 5 tracks or whatever it would have been better. But charging per car/track is a rip

[BurtonCCC]

That's such a huge rip-off. I'd rather spend $845 to put a Wii on each floor of my house. :)

Daniel.