Gran Turismo 7: Why Is Still Considered a “Simcade”?

Open any thread about Gran Turismo 7 and you’ll trip over the same word within five comments: simcade. People throw it around like everyone already agreed on what it means. They didn’t. So is it the driving? The fact that it’s built to pull in a huge audience? Or just that it parks itself somewhere between an arcade racer and a hardcore sim and refuses to pick a side?

Here’s the part that complicates the easy answers. Plenty of actual drivers, the kind who’ve turned laps in the real car and then loaded up the same model in the game, will tell you GT7 feels shockingly right behind the wheel. So if the driving holds up, where does the label keep coming from?

The Driving Was Never the Issue

Let’s get this out of the way. The physics are good now. Really good. The big update that rebuilt how the cars handle, roughly a year back, did most of the heavy lifting, and you can feel it the moment you load into a corner.

Grip, weight shifting around under braking, the way the back end talks to you when you lean on it: it all reads as believable. Ask around and most people land in the same place. Whatever gap exists between GT7 and the serious sims, it doesn’t really live in the driving itself. It lives in everything wrapped around the driving.

Simulation Is the Whole Weekend, Not Just the Lap

This is where the cracks start to show. A proper sim isn’t trying to nail the corner. It’s trying to recreate the entire race weekend, headache by headache.

The stuff people keep flagging:

• Pit stops run themselves.
• Race starts come with a helping hand.
• Mechanical damage that doesn’t really bite.
• Penalties and racing rules trimmed way down.
• Setups that don’t go very deep.

GT7 looks at all that friction and quietly strips a chunk of it out. The payoff is obvious: you can drop in and have fun on lap one, no engineering degree required.

Tires Are Where the Two Worlds Split

If you want the single clearest line between GT7 and the specialist sims, it’s the rubber.

In the demanding stuff, a tire is basically its own little simulation. You’re juggling:

• Core and surface temperatures.
• Hot spots that flat-spot you in one bad braking zone.
• Dirt and marbles picking up off the racing line.
• Overheating when you push too hard, too early.
• Wear that creeps up lap after lap.
• Grip that shifts under you as the track surface changes.

GT7 has versions of these, but they’re sanded down. The tire stays calmer, more predictable, easier to read. You lose some of the knife-edge tension. In exchange, the game stays approachable and stays fun.

A Track That Cuts You Slack

The other tell is the surface under you.

In a benchmark sim, a savage curb, a bump in the wrong spot, a crest that goes light, or one cheeky wheel on the grass can torch a whole lap. The track is out to get you.

Gran Turismo 7 plays nicer. The asphalt behaves far more evenly, so you can lean on the limit with confidence and the game shrugs off the small mistakes instead of punishing every one.

Less white-knuckle, more forgiving. That’s the trade.

Setups Kept Deliberately Light

Tuning comes up a lot too, and not in GT7’s favor.

Yes, you can mess with suspension, the differential, aero. But if you’ve spent time in a dedicated sim, the toolbox feels shallow by comparison. Fewer dials, less to obsess over.

There’s also a set of universal electronic aids you can slap on basically any car, whether or not the real thing would ever run them.

Purists hate that. Everyone else is just relieved they don’t have to treat every race like a lab session.

The Car Still Forgives a Lot

Push GT7 to the edge and it tends to catch you before you fall off it.

The usual examples:

• Spinning the thing out on purpose is weirdly hard.
• You’ll meet understeer way more often than a snappy rear.
• Caught a slide? Gathering it back up is pretty painless.
• On a controller there are quiet aids smoothing your inputs for you.

None of that is an accident. It’s what lets someone on a pad, with zero interest in extreme realism, still have a great time.

Most of This Has Nothing to Do With Physics

And here’s the kicker. GT7 could close most of the gap to a full sim without touching the handling model at all.

Bolt on a few things:

• Real qualifying before the race.
• Proper start procedures.
• Pit stops you actually have to manage.
• Damage that sticks and matters.
• Strategy that decides results.
• Fuel and tire management with real teeth.

Individually they sound minor. Stacked together, they completely change what a race feels like.

“Simcade” Isn’t an Insult

This is the part people skip past, and it’s the most important one.

Calling something a simcade shouldn’t read as a knock.

Gran Turismo has always been about the love of the machine first and the rulebook a distant second. Hunting down cars, dressing them up, parking them in a scenic corner for a photo, then actually driving them: that’s the soul of the series, and it always has been.

That’s exactly why millions of people get a near-sim experience out of it without sinking hundreds of hours into setup sheets, telemetry traces and pit strategy.

Pull together opinions from wildly different players and they mostly rhyme. GT7 isn’t a simcade because it drives badly. It’s a simcade because it smooths over a pile of things a complete simulation insists on keeping rough.

The physics earn their praise and have come a long way. But tire management, damage, race procedure, the aids, setup depth, strategy: line all of that up and GT7 still sits a step back from the most hardcore sims.

And maybe that step back is the whole point. GT7 nails a balance almost nobody else manages: it gets you close enough to feel the simulation, while staying loose enough to be fun, easy to pick up, and just as happy entertaining the casual five-lap crowd as the people who live and breathe motorsport.

You can purchase Gran Turismo 7  by clicking here for the PS4 version and here for the  PlayStation 5 Pro and PS4 versions. Additionally, there’s the 25th Anniversary Edition available for PS5 and PS4.