8 Video Games That Made You Hate Yourself

Reviews for Gran Turismo 7 dropped a few days before release and were positively glowing, praising Polyphony Digital for serving up one of the most visually stunning racing games ever made, with note-perfect driving mechanics to boot.

What the reviews didn't tell players about, however, is the game's crass monetisation practises. 

But this wasn't in any way a critical oversight - it's because Polyphony and Sony didn't switch the microtransactions on until launch, long after those rapturous reviews had been sent out into the world.

On launch day, not only were players given the ability to purchase in-game credits with real-world money, but credit payouts for races were reduced, in turn making the grind for credits to buy cars far more arduous and incentivising players to just open their wallets instead.

Naturally this went down not-well with fans, some of whom fought back by using a script with the PlayStation Remote Play app to let them grind races without needing to actually play the game themselves.

With some cars costing as much as $200, and Polyphony president Kazunori Yamauchi arguing that the more expensive cars were priced as such to "convey their value and rarity," a large swath of the fanbase was left absolutely irate.

To this very day, Gran Turismo 7 has an atrocious 2.4/10 user score on Metacritic, because unless you're got hundreds of bucks to spend on microtransactions or thousands of hours of spare time, it felt like Polyphony were showing utter contempt for the very people who made the series popular in the first place.

Again, there's a lesson to be learned here - even reviews can't be fully trusted, and unless you absolutely, positively need to play a game on launch day, it's probably smart to seek impressions of the release condition first.