Ianzzz:
While there is money being made, they will not let go - only when it is worth nought will they try to off load it
It might be quite the opposite, as is often the case when capital is raised for a start-up. If WGT becomes valuable enough, the investors will want their return, which can only be realized through a sale.
For me, that sale can't come soon enough. WGT has a great golf game, but they are lousy business people. One quote in fatdan's post struck me as an especially ridiculous bit of lip service: “As a company we take a methodical, thorough and long term strategy to do things the right way."
I hate to think about how many potential long-term customers have left over the years that would have stuck around if WGT was really taking a long view - If they were planning on selling a million sleeves of 200 credit balls a month instead of a thousand sleeves of 700 credit balls. If they didn't take the quick profit off of a ball in the weeds at the expense of building ill will. If they had reliable servers. If they didn't dump big money into marketing when the site was in meltdown mode. If they didn't place the best equipment years away from a average daily player. What kind of business refuses to sell its best product to the vast majority of its customers?
Lots of other good stuff in this thread, much of it has crossed my mind lately.
To the OP's question - I agree with YankeeJim. The site goes to hell every winter. I asked the same question as the OP in PMs to friends each of the past two years. Now I know better.
The competition - There really is none. I completely disagree with anybody who thinks that the other available games are for "golfers" while WGT is for "gamers". That's absurd. The opposite is true.
If you can't run those other games on your machine (and most of us can't run them well, if at all) all you have to do is look at the Perfect Golf forum and see how many of their users have their gaming-machine specs in their sig lines. It's Gamer City over there. And yes, you need to do some basic math to be good at that game, too.
WGT, in contrast, appeals to the broadest possible audience...golfers, lawyers, delivery drivers, kids, old folks...it's accessible to just about anybody, and it still looks and plays better than the others.
The mobile game versus Flash - I'm all for WGT devoting resources to mobile. It's the future, and there's no denying it. And it still might prove to be a good thing for PC players. I wrote in another post in February: "We now know that WGT can use it's assets (photos, terrain, physics) on another platform. The mobile game feels different, but it's all on the surface really. The clubs, balls, wind, and greens all behave exactly the same on Android. The really good news is that they should be able to transition away from Flash gradually - that is, they can build on Unity (or something else), then roll out an improved game on a platform with a future", all without disrupting the user experience.
If WGT chooses to focus on mobile versions, there's always a workaround for PC users. BlueStacks lets you play Android games on a PC. For anybody who hasn't seen the mobile version yet, here's me playing a few holes on my computer...