It’s a little artificially bloated.
My PS4 Pro’s disk insert mechanism started developing issues around 2 and a half years ago, and to load up GT Sport I need to eject the disk and then shake and smack the console to get the disk all the way in and have it start reading. What this has turned into is me leaving the main menu run overnight to avoid doing another disk dance, but then forgetting to play the following day. Sometimes it goes as long as a week or two without me touching the game but it’s still running the menu or a pre race screen, and it clocks it as gameplay hours.
While I most definitely don’t have that full 11.5k hours logged in reality, I absolutely was a livery fiend in the first year of launch, and I very likely clocked close to 300 hours in the first month of covid lockdown.
This took me around 40 hours back in early 2018 (I was one of the few people who received a 20 mil car before from the wheel of pain before it was patched out):
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It’s hard to say what my true playtime is, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it was over 5-6000 honest hours of actual hands-on gameplay. I made hundreds of liveries, usually putting a lot of effort into authentic color matching with the HSV color code system, or decal searching, rarely spending less than 2 hours for each creation, and each car getting quite a lot of seat time (I made at least 8 ND Miata’s for the MX5 league event cuz I kept getting so many duplicates). I also refused to play the grinding game, and came of with creative ways to slowly build credits while staying engaged. This turned into a loop of me finding a really slow car I could use in an incomplete League event, put hours into a livery I felt proud of, and then incrementally tune the car until it can just barely beat the event - once I got the gold I had to switch to a new “project car”. The result was a huge garage of cars I cared a lot about and could take to lobbies for fun on occasion - but crucially, a loooooot of gameplay hours.
This is how I’ll be playing 7 once I can finally get past this godforsaken Music Rally screen:
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Also, apparently on a fresh system with zero update history, it only needs to download the latest update, not the whole 3.5 year backlog? I remember the GT6 days where it was possibly a 3-5 day ordeal for new players to try to hop in and get the game set up. Hopefully that is in fact all it is, cuz I might be able to start playing tonight!!!
