In our review of Gran Turismo 7, we warned that players should "be prepared to grind" for the in-game credits needed to buy some expensive in-game cars. We also said the game "will try to tempt you to open your real wallet to buy in-game credits a little more frequently than you might like." Now, some enterprising players have found a way to avoid that grind for Gran Turismo 7 credits: They've automated a credit-earning method that doesn't require actually playing the game.

The method—publicized Monday by PSNProfiles user Septomor and noted by VGC—takes advantage of some PC scripting tools and PlayStation's Remote Play tool. By sending preset inputs to a local PS4 or PS5 via Remote Play, the PC script runs through a single race automatically and ceaselessly, earning what some users are reporting is millions of in-game credits in a day (and/or avoiding hundreds of dollars in microtransaction costs that could buy those credits).

The automation follows the release of GT7's controversial version 1.07 patch, which greatly depressed the number of credits players can earn per race. The patch increased the in-game time required to earn GT7's most expensive cars by about 63 percent, according to a GT Planet analysis, making an already grind-heavy game even grind-heavier (and likely encouraging more players to spend real money to skip that grind).

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"I know with nerfs people are not happy and are probably turned off by the enormous grind, or at least I am," Septomor wrote alongside a post publicizing the automation. "So here are some scripts, created to adjust for those nerfs."

"In GT7, I would like to have users enjoy lots of cars and races even without microtransactions," Polyphony Digital's Kazunori Yamauchi wrote in a post-patch update on the Gran Turismo website. "At the same time, the pricing of cars is an important element that conveys their value and rarity, so I do think it's important for it to be linked with the real-world prices. I want to make GT7 a game in which you can enjoy a variety of cars lots of different ways and if possible would like to try to avoid a situation where a player must mechanically keep replaying certain events over and over again."

's version 1.07 patch was also responsible for a more-than-30-hour server outage that hobbled the game last week. The outage barred gamers from most single-player modes as well as multiplayer races. The game's online servers were linked to single-player progression as an anticheating tool, as Yamauchi told Ars during a preview event for the game.