Gran Turismo 7 developer apologizes after 30 hours of downtime

Published , by Donovan Erskine

It’s not uncommon for a developer to briefly take a game offline in order to perform some necessary maintenance in order to keep things working as expected. In some cases, server maintenance can be extensive and cause frustration for players. Gran Turismo 7 set a new bar when it went down for a whopping 30 hours recently due to some unexpected issues during a scheduled server maintenance. Now, the developer has issued an apology and an explanation.

Polyphony Digital CEO Kazunori Yamauchi shared a statement to Gran Turismo 7 fans to discuss the update 1.07 downtime that began early on March 17 and lasted until the morning of March 18. “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,” he said. It was this game-breaking issue that caused the developers to keep the servers offline for roughly 30 hours.

It was during this extended period that PS4 and PS5 players weren’t able to get into Gran Turismo 7, since the game requires you to have an online connection in order to play. It highlights a major complaint in the digital era of gaming, where even most single-player experiences require the player to be constantly connected to the internet and updated to a game’s latest version.

It’s a bit mind-boggling that a game as new and big as Gran Turismo 7 was completely unplayable for over 24 hours, but those issues have now been resolved. Despite those frustrations, we found the game to be an excellent entry in the racing series in our review.