Why Aren’t 89% of *Gran Turismo 7* Players Buying Into the Planned Update?

Sony’s recently unveiled “The Playerbase” initiative was supposed to feel like a love letter to core players. According to the official concept, they would select one loyal player from the community, perform a facial scan, place that real face into Gran Turismo 7, and pair it with a custom fantasy livery and team logo. It sounds a lot like the kind of RPG reward where “you finally become part of the world,” but the problem is that players quickly realized it felt more like a neatly packaged real-world side quest, and the reward was far less compelling than the promotion made it seem.

A quick survey of 1,000 PS5 players conducted by Push Square poured cold water on the event. 62% of respondents said they had no interest at all, while another 27% expressed serious concerns about privacy and security, adding up to 89% with either negative or indifferent attitudes. That figure is telling, because it’s not simply a case of “the event isn’t cool enough” — it shows that emotionally and in terms of risk assessment, players do not see this as an opportunity worth investing in.

The controversy first centers on the mechanism itself. Only 1 final winner will be selected worldwide, and applicants must also go through a video interview, which makes many people feel less like they are taking part in a community giveback and more like they are entering an unpaid talent competition. For ordinary players, this selection process lacks a sense of sharing and companionship, leaving only the hesitation of “why should I hand over so much for a spot I have almost no chance of getting?”

The bigger minefield, however, is the authorization terms. According to public information, participants must allow Sony to use their likeness, voice, and other personal information for game development and promotion. In 2026, at a time when the risks of generative AI and deepfakes are being discussed constantly, players’ caution toward biometric data is no longer overblown — it is very real self-protection. The comment, “Who wants this? I hope this isn’t being used to train some damn AI model,” actually hits the nerve of the entire public reaction.

Another issue raised by many people, and one that stings even more, is that Gran Turismo 7 is ultimately a racing simulation game, not a narrative-driven title that emphasizes character presence. Stuffing a real player’s face into an NPC offers only a minimal boost to immersion, far less direct than adding new tracks, expanding the car roster, or fixing bugs. In other words, players are not opposed to being appreciated; they are opposed to being asked for highly sensitive data in a way that delivers value they can barely feel.

From an industry perspective, this controversy carries a deeper implication as well. Some players worry that Sony is testing the waters for a “user-generated content + AI scanning” workflow, laying the groundwork for a larger-scale digital crowd actor model in the future. If publishers grow increasingly accustomed to extracting image assets from their communities without offering clear compensation, boundaries, and removal mechanisms, then today’s Gran Turismo 7 dispute may only be the opening lap.

Isabelle Tomatis, Sony’s Vice President of Global Marketing, said that over the past 30 years the player community has always been at the core of PlayStation’s history and future, and described The Playerbase as an expression of gratitude. But judging from the current response, the gratitude players want is not something abstract. What they want are more transparent rules, more restrained data collection, and more visible content updates. For PS5 players who are still on the fence, this event itself offers almost no real reason to participate; what truly deserves attention is not who will become that NPC in Gran Turismo 7, but whether gaming platforms in the future will gradually turn “community interaction” into a data-harvesting experiment based on implied consent.