Out of curiosity, what is the upside or downside for PD when they set up the dailies? They aren’t gaining or losing money. Do the numbers affect their revenue somehow? Honest question, not a sarcastic rhetorical question.
It's multi faceted to be honest. As a live service game they have access to way more data than previous games.
The dailies need to serve two purposes, 1 retain players, they need a user base to sell from to the higher ups.
2. Increase player numbers which means making races that anyone can have fun in.
Games like this heavily depend on a sticky user base, I'll ignore the career stuff because I don't think that is ever gonna be sticky to those that want to live out fantasies of being race drivers.
When you really sit back and think about it the dailies are hugely important.
Just looking at the TT participation numbers you get a sense of the scale and arguably it's not awesome.
Some TTs have 150k try. Now if these were all sports mode players the global index looks quite thin at any given time. This is why we get matched with people we have raced with. The population is in relative terms small.
So when they pick a daily race they need to make it sticky (people do it more, they need to balance new and experienced player preferences, and it has to fit the slots)
Edit:
When you factor in the esports angle things get complicated.
Esports generally don't want tuned cars or ice races. So those are largely playing to the less race orientated people. Or less competitive types.
The dailies have to serve a purpose for the stickiness (things like daily marathon, it's a time based metric not a mileage based one)
So upsides:
- more people log on, race and spend time in the game
- down sides less people participate or are drawn in to the mode thus not increasing player volume or esport recognition.
Edit 2: to answer the question:
Yes it hits the bottom line.
The more players engaged with the game the more copies they will sell of the next game.
The more people playing the game, the more budget they get from Sony for the next one.
Whilst these are high level objectives (most of us have a 25 year history with the franchise tbf) to grow users, buyers, daily active users they have to make a compelling product. Arguably the most ardent GT fans (not in volume) are those that race online, invest in being competitive or reach out to peeps to be more competitive is the core market, the game is the mass market. But I don't think we stay for Sunday cups or Jimnys....