Both documents about Gran Turismo 7's 1.71 update are accurate. Only one of them tells you your saved tune might no longer qualify for the event you built it for.
One update, two descriptions
PlayStation's post is a field guide to four cars, sorted into categories with a suggested starting track for each. Polyphony Digital's update notice covers the same patch and spends most of its length elsewhere: a revised tyre algorithm, reworked engine torque control, new steering geometry and damper characteristics, changes to traction control and ABS.
And one line that reaches further than all of it: Performance Points "have been recalculated for cars throughout the game."
PP is not a detail
Performance Points decide which events a car is allowed to enter. Anyone who has tuned a car to sit just under a category ceiling did that maths against the old formula, and the notice also revises default suspension, differential and aerodynamic settings along with their adjustment ranges.
This is the single most consequential thing in the patch for engaged players, and it appears in exactly one of the two documents — the one with no push notification behind it.
The platform post is doing its job
It would be easy and wrong to call this deceptive. A platform blog exists to give a large, mostly casual audience a reason to launch the game tonight. "Four cars and a new photo location" does that. "We revised tyre heating and wear values" does not, and demanding otherwise misunderstands what the post is for.
Polyphony's notice, meanwhile, is excellent. It names which cars had maximum engine RPM revised, which behave differently under forced downshifts, and which Fanatec wheels need a firmware update for the new Auto Setup profiles. Nobody is hiding anything.
The failure is distribution, not honesty
The problem is which document travels. A first-party platform blog is syndicated, aggregated and rewritten across dozens of outlets within hours. A developer's update notice on the game's own site is found by people who already went looking.
So the version of 1.71 that reached most players was the one that omitted the physics rewrite, and the phrasing compounded it — "three new World Circuits" in the platform post versus Polyphony's own, more accurate "three race events" on existing tracks.
The hardware changes make the same point. Auto Setup profiles were retuned for three Fanatec wheels and FullForce support arrived on the GT DD Pro, both requiring a device firmware update the player has to go and install. That is an action item, not a nice-to-know, and it exists only in the developer's document.
There is a reader-side version of the same gap. Mechanical damage thresholds changed, a new Championship damage option arrived between the existing settings, and traction control and ABS behaviour were both adjusted — changes that reach players who never open a tuning menu and would never think to check a changelog. The people least likely to read the technical document are among those most affected by it.
This is a norm worth changing
For any game with a competitive ladder, a ranking system or a tuning meta, the developer's patch notes should be treated as the document of record by everyone — publishers, platform holders and the press. Marketing posts should link to them prominently rather than substitute for them.
The mechanism already exists. PlayStation's post does point readers to gran-turismo.com for more on the update. It is a single line near the end, after the car guide, and it carries the weight of an afterthought rather than a pointer to the more important document.
Nothing here is unique to Polyphony or to PlayStation. The same split exists wherever a first-party blog and a developer changelog describe one release, and it widens as aggregation gets faster — the marketing post is machine-readable, syndicated and search-optimised, while the changelog is a page on a site nobody has bookmarked.
What a reader should take from it
Two footnotes from the platform post make the case on their own. The update requires an internet connection, and credits are required to buy the four cars — they are not gifts, which is the most common misreading of a free update that adds content.
If those needed a footnote in the friendly version, the recalculation of every car's Performance Points needed a headline somewhere. Until publishers treat it that way, the practical advice for anyone who cares about a game's systems is unchanged: read the developer's notes, and treat the blog post as the trailer.
