According to Polyphony Digital studio head Kazunori Yamauchi, the total lifetime player count Gran Turismo Sport is now at 9.5 million users. Yamauchi shared this issue as part of an interview with Japanese journalist Toshifume Watanabi, for the Japanese regional version of Octane magazine, published this past weekend.
We already covered some of the contents of this interview, when Yamauchi spoke about the influences behind Gran Turismo and Gran Turismo 7the return of a format more similar to the previous titles of the main sequence. However, the interview also addressed some other topics, including Scapes – which Yamauchi now says numbered “in the thousands” – and the importance of real-time ray tracing. Among the other topics, there was a brief discussion about GT Sport.
Talking about how the series changes from title to title, Yamauchi explained that “we consciously incorporate some new challenges every time we change generations. That’s why each title has fans, but sometimes the changes seemed to confuse users. ” It brings the concept of how GT Sport it depended more on online e-sports, and how that initially seemed to discourage some fans. “With that, we reached 9.5 million users, but it didn’t sell explosively from the beginning, and it seemed that the understanding gradually advanced and support increased over the three years.
Of course, users and sales are not entirely the same. Some players may have taken a copy of the game and never played it, or even bought two or three to collect special editions. Others can run on multiple accounts or allow other players in the house to access the game. However, we previously reported that the GT Sport passed the seven million player mark and the eight million sales mark, three months apart.
This suggests that about a quarter of all GT Sport players won the title in the last 20 months and that would imply approximately the same proportion of the game’s sales. The game surpassed 3.3 million sales in the first eight months of its life, but it appears to have experienced linear growth until its second anniversary, before sales began to decline more recently.
Even so, with the fourth season of the FIA Online Championship approaching and the prospect of Sports Mode becoming part of the Gran Turismo 7offer, the game can reach ten million users and sales before the next generation title. That would put you above Gran Turismo 2 and fifth in the sales ranking of all time.
You can read the Octane interview with Yamauchi here, although it is in Japanese.
Featured image courtesy of 05XR8.