Post
Sony's racing-sim specialist that ships one Gran Turismo per console generation and outsells its competitors combined.
Founded in 1998 from the Sony Computer Entertainment Polys Entertainment team, Polyphony Digital is led by Kazunori Yamauchi — a real-world endurance racer who has driven the Nürburgring 24 Hours multiple times. The studio has shipped seven mainline Gran Turismo games since 1997, with combined sales over 90M copies, making it the best-selling first-party PlayStation franchise. Gran Turismo 7 (2022) and the GT Sophy AI race-engineer (2023) extended the franchise into machine-learning racing AI.
Example
GT Sophy (2022, 2023) — Polyphony's collaboration with Sony AI on machine-learning race AI — beat top human Gran Turismo drivers in a public test. The AI is now integrated into Gran Turismo 7 as a training opponent, the first ML racing AI shipped in a commercial game.
Why it matters
Polyphony is the case study for a small, deeply specialized studio attached to platform-defining IP. Their cycle (one game every ~5 years, exhaustively researched) is the inverse of annualized AAA — and the math works because Sony lets it.
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