Gran Turismo 5 DLC are Account and Region Locked. Be Careful When Purchasing – UPDATED

Giuseppe Nelva October 18, 2011 11:15 AM EST

The new DLC packages for Gran Turismo 5 released today in Europe and Japan have been delayed in the US, meaning that some impatient American virtual racers looked into purchasing the content with an European PSN account, thinking that the DLC would just carry over to their American one.

This is unfortunately not the case, as Sony Computer Entertainment communicated today that the DLC are valid only for the account they have been purchased on.

Additionally, the DLCs are region locked, and can be used only with a disk and a PS3 from the same region as the account on which the purchase has been made.

So, if you live in the US, you may want to actually wait for October the 25th before making your purchase, or you may find yourself with a bunch of useless data on your hard disk.

UPDATE: Kazunori Yamauchi just addressed the issue on his twitter account, saying that there’s nothing Polyphony Digital can do about it:

Resolving the problem with using the DLC on multiple accounts is not simple.” It would be best if we could attribute the entitlement to use the DLC items to multiple accounts in the same PS3, but there is nothing like that in the PSN setup, and we can only assign the entitlements per User ID.” There just isn’t a good solution for this I can think of.” The entitlement to these non-onetime DLC’s can’t be attributed to the PS3 console.”

It’s probably not what the users affected would like to hear, but, for the moment, that’s all he had to say about the issue. We will update our readers if something new surfaces.

UPDATE 2: After purchasing the DLC myself, I noticed that the paint chips you get with the paint package are one-off consumables, exactly like the paint chips you get in game. Whether you think they are worth it or not, it’s your own call. This is just an heads-up to help making an informed purchase.