Gran Turismo 7 getting its first paid DLC and GT Sophy 3.0 soon

Mere hours after posting some really nice PlayStation numbers for the previous quarter – 84.2 million PS5 units shipped worldwide, 6.3 million first-party games sold in Q2, Ghost of Yotei alone selling over 3.3 million copies in four weeks – Sony hosted its State of Play Japan presentation, focusing on games produced by and/or for the Asian market. Expectations were high, with many PlayStation fans hoping for fresh information ranging from the Project Zero release date to a Bloodborne PS5 port announcement, but this particular State of Play was notable for an entirely different reason: during its course the first-ever paid DLC for Gran Turismo 7 was announced, offering a possible glance into Sony’s future plans for the franchise.

This DLC is called “GT7 Power Pack” and it features no less than “50 new races across 20 categories, based on countries and automotive culture, including 24-hour races”, which is probably as demanding as it sounds. The new race events offer the opportunity “of playing through a full session, from practice and qualifying to the race itself” (so qualifiers are back at long last). The GT7 Power Pack includes 5.000.000 in-game credits – their actual value is around $40 – for players to spend any way they see fit.

Kazunori Yamauchi noted that the GT7 Power Pack includes Gran Turismo Sophy 3.0, Polyphony Digital’s AI-based agent that promises “nail-biting, close quarters, tail-to-nose racing” thanks to the company’s machine-learning system that “teaches” its virtual driver the nuances of human on-track behavior. It’s fair to say that GT Sophy sounded much more exciting when it was first announced all the way back in February 2023, but maybe this new version really does provide the AI-driven competition initially promised. The GT7 Power Pack is exclusive to the PS5, meaning that GT Sophy 3.0 will most probably not be available to PS4 owners of the game.

In any case, this DLC for GT7 is a clear departure from Polyphony’ Digital’s usual practices. It’s not the first time a Gran Turismo game offered extra content in the form of paid DLC – GT5 on the PS3 offered car packs and course packs for small amounts of money – but it’s the first time the company is charging for anything on GT7 other than in-game credits. It did not charge for anything extra in Gran Turismo 6 on the PS3 or in Gran Turismo Sport on the PS4 either, so it’s been more than a decade since Polyphony Digital released any paid DLC for its games.

Truth be told, Polyphony has released a lot of extra, high-quality GT7 content free of charge since spring 2022, be it cars, tracks and scapes or weekly challenges, online events and additional game options. But maybe Sony now feels that deeper, more expansive content for its flagship racing game (like what this Power Pack seems to be) should come at a cost. It will be interesting to see, then, whether (a) consumers are willing to spend more money or any money at all on an already content-rich game like GT7 and, if yes, (b) how many these consumers actually are. It will be interesting to us and, obviously, interesting to Sony – for future reference, if nothing else.

In the case of the GT7 Power Pack consumer reception will be hard to tell unless Sony themselves publish official sales numbers: we do know, for instance, that GT7 has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, but that’s for the PS5 and the PS4 version of the game (which is not compatible with this DLC). As for the cost of the GT7 Power Pack itself, Polyphony has not yet made that known… but it will soon, as it’s supposed to be out on December 4th. That may or may not be the day that the big GT7 “Spec III” December update – announced back in September – is made available to all players, so we’ll find out about that too. Not long, now…