Kazunori Yamauchi has revealed that GT Sport may not be a main sequence Gran Turismo title after all.

Yamauchi was speaking to German-language gaming site 4players during the Audi Vision GT reveal event this week. The team at 4players was able to put some questions to him about current and future plans for GT Sport and Gran Turismo in general. One of the questions focused on what Polyphony Digital has in mind for the next game.

As we know, GT Sport’s core is esports. It’s a very different purpose from previous titles in the series. Players haven’t met the change with universal praise; the small vehicle and track list at launch was compact to fit the esports vision. This meant as little excess content as possible.

The online focus extends as far as shutting down huge portions of the game when not connected, even requiring a connection to save the game. Good post-launch support has tempered this somewhat — the game now includes a more traditional offline mode.

However, the online racing portion of GT Sport is more of a success. With constant tweaks to the Balance of Performance — the system for equalizing the pace of the various cars within a class — and the penalty system, the team is still fine-tuning it. Since launch, the game has run test seasons for its flagship FIA events, with the main event due to start this month.

It’s this online racing component that Yamauchi believes will form the core of future Gran Turismo titles too. This, suggests 4player, means that there won’t be any need for a specific “sports” version of a GT title.

Instead, it will form a section of a future numbered title — although it’s also possible that Polyphony Digital will continue to tinker with GT Sport until it becomes a full-fledged seventh version of the game. This harks back to comments Yamauchi made in 2010 about Gran Turismo as a service for continual expansion, rather than as discrete titles.

There’s more to come from this interview (which you can read in the original German here), so keep your eyes on GTPlanet.

Hat tip to GTPlanet member GT Sport — yes, really — for the tip!

Featured image courtesy of RL_23.

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