The photo quality shown to their customers by WGT is a disgrace. The photos look a lot worse than even a mediocre phone camera would produce in good light. If you look at the images in the PC version, you see very heavy JPG artifacts that ruin their image quality. Most noticeable are smudges around the edges especially at the horizon and around trees. And square tiles that ruin the look of the texture of the grass in fairways tees and greens.
The photos shown in the mobile version look better by not showning equally obvious compression artifacts. They are indeed adequate for viewing on a small phone. But if you look at a screenshot on a big monitor you will notice that the artifacts are less noticeable but the image looks like a blur filter has been applied and the image shows even less details than the PC version.
I don´t understand that WGT is still using the same absurdly poor quality with Pebble Beach they used when WGT started their service. And I don´t even understand why they used it back then.
Crippling your own product is definitely a poor design and marketing strategy. If google used this design philosophy nobody would use them and the company by now would likely be bankrupt instead of being the most valuable company on this planet.
And I think the poor image quality is costing WGT a lot of potential customers. Many of them register take a look at what is offered and then either never play or abandon the game after a short time. I think a lot more of them would stay around if the photos of the courses would be shown in their full quality.
Andreas