So when is Gran Turismo coming to the PC anyway?

Sony’s latest State of Play broadcast revealed a number of new games coming to the PS5 and the PC in 2024 and 2025, some of which look genuinely promising right now. The company also confirmed the long-standing rumors of God of War: Ragnarok coming to PC in September, as well as a version of Until Dawn also planned for PCs in Q4. Adding these two to the growing list of AAA PlayStation exclusives already available for PC (no less than twelve since 2020), as well as the all-but-certain PC versions of Spider-man 2 and The Last of Us Part II, only leaves a single recent Sony-developed mainstream megahit that’s not been a part of the company’s plans for the PC games market so far.

That would be Gran Turismo 7. But why is it that nobody’s talking about this game’s PC version in particular?

It most probably comes down to two words or, rather, one name: Kazunori Yamauchi. The famous or infamous – depending on who you ask – creator of the Gran Turismo series is the kind of man that’s both a blessing and a curse: a visionary always looking to break new ground in the racing game genre in terms of functionality or cutting-edge tech and an infuriatingly stubborn perfectionist with questionable managerial skills. A talented producer of great ambition but also one who often won’t release a GT title unless pressured by Sony’s board. Yamauchi is the driving force behind Gran Turismo, the one person who has held the series back in various ways and the series’ practically irreplaceable director, all at once.

So, Gran Turismo being Kazunori Yamauchi’s baby and all, it’s hard to imagine him letting another Sony PlayStation Studios team – like e.g. Nixxes – handle the PC port of GT7. No, Yamauchi would definitely prefer to manage this as an internal project. What’s more, being the ambitious person that he is, Yamauchi would consider entering the highly competitive and demanding PC racing games scene a challenge in and of itself – one he would only accept if he felt he can truly impress PC gamers with an absolutely breathtaking, feature-complete version of Gran Turismo.

The obvious problem here is that Yamauchi’s Polyphony Digital has not worked on a PC version of anything, ever. Yes, most Japanese studios are generally known to lag behind US or European ones when it comes to PC games, but Polyphony in particular has only ever worked on PlayStation systems. If Yamauchi was to port Gran Turismo 7 over to Windows/Linux in the way PC gamers expect in 2024 or 2025 – offering support for upscaling technologies, frame generation, raytracing, different aspect ratios, plenty of control and configuration options etc. at launch – it would require the kind of technical know-how that takes studios years to acquire. Not to mention any unique PlayStation features probably requiring quite a bit of effort to bring across, like e.g. GT Sophy.

If that’s what’s been happening behind the scenes over the last three years – Polyphony Digital internally developing a PC version of Gran Turismo using its own teams and resources – Sony has done an unusually good job at keeping it under wraps. Given how secretive Yamauchi-san himself is, it’s no wonder that there have been hardly any rumors – let alone official news – about GT7 getting the PC treatment. It has been mentioned here and there as part of Sony’s possible lineup of ports for 2024 but, without any solid information source attached to this kind of speculation, it’s practically impossible to make any predictions. We’re literally in the dark when it comes to GT on the PC.

Still, it would make sense for GT7 to launch on the PC this year. The title is going to be seriously upgraded sometime in the fall or winter in order to help Sony make its case with the much-discussed PlayStation5 Pro: Kazunori Yamauchi loves to leverage new hardware in order to show off what it can truly do and a more detailed, more performant GT7 would be just the thing (raytraced graphics during races anyone?). Revealing a PC version of GT7 along the PS5 Pro one would probably help both, grabbing more headlines than either would on its own. Sony’s focus on live service games and PC ports throughout 2024 would also be perfectly aligned with a Windows/Linux version of GT7 breaking cover this year. It has been long enough.

There’s little doubt that Gran Turismo 7 will be getting a PC version at one point or another: not only could this be a strong statement on Sony’s part in terms of cutting-edge graphics technology, but – more importantly – it would be the kind of live service title PC gamers would actually not mind getting a PlayStation Network account for. Provided a PC version of GT7 meets the expectations of those consumers, it could also pave the way for the approach Sony will be following in the future, “encouraging” PC gamers to invest in a PS5 or PS6 in order to play the inevitable (and timed-exclusive) GT8. Question is: can Yamauchi and Polyphony Digital rise to the occasion by offering a truly impressive PC version of Gran Turismo in a manner that makes business sense? We’ll just have to wait and see.