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So long, EA Sports: ‘The Golf Club’ developer secures PGA Tour license

Steven Petite
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The Golf Club 2019 Featuring PGA TOUR announcement.

HB Studios, the independent studio behind The Golf Club series, has secured PGA Tour licensing for the third game in the series, The Golf Club 2019, which launches this August (via GolfChannel).

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The Golf Club 2019 will feature a robust career mode that takes players through Q-School (to get their tour card), the Web.com Tour, and eventually to the big stage, the PGA Tour, where users will play through 32 events culminating with the FedEx Cup Playoffs. At launch, the game will feature six replicas of TPC venues.

  • TPC Summerlin (Shriners Hospitals for Children Open)
  • TPC Scottsdale Stadium (Waste Management Phoenix Open)
  • TPC Sawgrass’ The Players Stadium Course (The Players Championship)
  • TPC Southwind (FedEx St. Jude Classic)
  • TPC Deere Run (John Deere Classic)
  • TPC Boston (Dell Technologies Championship)

Since the PGA Tour season will be 32 events, many of the events will still be played on courses designed by HB Studios, though it sounds as if more official courses could be made available post-launch. Up until now, The Golf Club series has gotten its legs from its elaborate course design tools. Players can design their own 18-hole courses, upload them to the servers, and enjoy a near endless number of different venues (more than 170,000 user-created courses have been made so far). Although both games in the series feature solid simulation golf, the lack of an official license has probably limited the game’s overall reach among fans.

The Golf Club launched in 2014, and its sequel, The Golf Club 2, arrived just last summer. The quick turnaround for the third entry and the shift to a yearly naming convention signals that HB Studios may be trying to pick up where EA Sports left off. For more than two decades, EA Sports was a consistent and reliable producer of licensed golf games, including the lengthy stretch of Tiger Woods PGA Tour titles from 1999 to 2013. EA tried to move the series forward in 2015 with Rory McILroy PGA Tour, but it was severely lacking compared to the Tiger Woods branded titles.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear that HB Studios has been granted player licenses, so don’t expect to relive the glory days playing as Tiger Woods or teeing it up as Jordan Spieth.

The Golf Club 2019 launches in August on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

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Steven Petite
Steven Petite
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Steven is a writer from Northeast Ohio currently based in Louisiana. He writes about video games and books, and consumes…
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