The Gran Turismo racing game series is particularly popular on the PlayStation – and in the PS4 era, Gran Turismo Sport, among others, caused a sensation. However, now the game has suddenly been withdrawn from sale.
But this suddenly happened shortly after the turn of the year: Gran Turismo Sport was removed from the PlayStation Store and can no longer be purchased. There had been no prior announcement regarding the PS4-exclusive racer.
The sales halt is likely to come in anticipation of the impending shutdown of the game’s online servers – a step that was announced last year. From January 31, 2024, the online servers will no longer be accessible. However, Gran Turismo Sport largely relies on this online component, so that from then on the game loses most of its appeal.
The step to stop sales of the full version is probably only logical, but could perhaps have been communicated better. This is not entirely surprising, as DLC packages and add-ons have already been removed from sale since December 1, 2023. However, it was not known until now that the entire game would no longer be listed in the PS Store in the future.
Gran Turismo Sport was released exclusively for the PlayStation 4 in 2017 and received mixed reviews at the time; Overall, the title fell somewhat short of the high level of the previous parts of the well-known series. However, public perception of the game later improved thanks to all sorts of post-launch updates.
The fact that the title is now being discontinued entirely may also be due to Sony’s expiring licenses. The makers are also likely to focus on the more recent series offshoot Gran Turismo 7, which has been available since 2022.
From tomorrow, July 8th, the update to version 1.66 will be available for Gran Turismo Sport.
