Chad, Good to hear from you on the forums again! Thank you for easing our concerns.
I admit my first impression was should I ride free in a Rolls or pay a dollar to ride in a Yugo? Along the lines of what SgtBilko posted.
SGTBilko:
Why should I pay for a lesser quality course just to have a different variety. Ask yourself that question and I believe you as most other would say no. While I applaud your innovative thinking on this there were other things you could have done to settle the masses down, new pin placements would have changed a lot of the game play and staleness of the stroke play courses.
Please re-focus more of your efforts along areas like this and I think you would appease most of the masses on here.
(Hey SgtBilko where's that out-of-the-box thinking you espouse? ;-) Just bustin' ya man. )
After chewing on this for a couple of days and checking out TruGolf here's how I see it now.
WGT is a golf simulation company, a golf purist if you will, aimed at producing realistic golf experiences and able to reach the largest possible audience on the internet. Your major competitor is Tiger Woods Online, who produces a golf game and has churned out about 20 3D rendered animations for the mass gamer audience which includes the under age 18 population. TWO is probably kicking your butt in terms of total members and revenue.
TruGolf is also a golf simulation company, a purist too and their sim aims at the commercial and at home markets. @ $25K to $45K a pop their target market is the wealthy. It might be that market has gone soft with the economy? I don't know. Perhaps they toyed with the idea of putting their 3D sim on the internet. In which case they would be a threat to WGT and TWO.
Technical problems with their 3D engine and interface would be barriers. (It would likely need to be downloaded to a PC to run, a new swing interface developed, plus the website and community part of the business would all require a major investment on TruGolf's part.)
This partnership between WGT and TruGolf could be a stroke of genius! IMO. Its got lots of potential even with the reaction given to the Cabo del Sol introduction. Which now looks more to me like a trial balloon and prototype.
Let me explain how. In real life production of a WGT course a platoon of photographers walk the course with a list of all the GPS locations, or a set of instructions, and take a photo from each spot. And they fly over the course in helicopters at various heights also taking photos. The 100,000 photos then come back to the office and each photo gets a work over to remove the cart girl and golfers, give it a sunny sky, etc. That's lots of work and expense.
In WGT/TruGolf production I think the photo production is way easier. TruGolf has a 3D virtual representation of each golf course in its product and can produce an image of the course from any spot. A software program(call it a virtual photographer) could generate GPS coordinates for every photo needed by WGT to map every hole on the course. TruGolf feeds those coordinates into its virtual course and produces an image for each spot using its e6 full 3D engine. Those images are shipped back to WGT and require zero retouching.
I hope WGT is heading in that direction. Use the best graphics engine TruGolf has, the e6 full 3D. Use those images in the WGT game.
TruGolf gets on the internet, and gets revenue. WGT produces courses lickety split and gets more members and more revenue. This would be the result!
TWO better look out!