When We Made... PGA TOUR 2K23
As PGA Tour 2K returns for a second outing on the greens, Vince Pavey checks in with Josh Muise, creative director for HB Studios and Alfie Brody, vice president of global marketing strategy for 2K Games to learn all about it. Hopefully, this article is up to par
From left: Josh Muise, creative director for HB Studios and Alfie Brody, vice president of global marketing strategy for 2K Games
he story of the PGA Tour games of the last ten years is a complicated one that requires knowledge of actual sports, so excuse us if we pass over some of the more complex details: EA Sports had developed PGA Tour games regularly since 1990, but a personal scandal had ousted longtime cover star golfer Tiger Woods, and its 2015 attempt to rebrand with Rory McIlroy PGA Tour had underperformed. The company had then let the series go quiet, and it is no surprise that another studio and publisher would soon attempt to try and take over where EA had left off. Enter HB Studios, which managed
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to secure a small licence from the PGA Tour to feature six golf courses and a PGA Tour career mode in its third The Golf Club game in 2018. While EA Sports continued to insist that it
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hadn’t broken up with the PGA Tour and that the pair still had an “ongoing relationship”, 2K Sports swiftly took over publishing rights for The Golf Club 2019 featuring PGA Tour. 2K then worked to secure a longer, more extensive PGA Tour licence, and would soon acquire developer HB Studios as well.
THE GAME IS FLUID
A few years on, a larger HB Studios is now on its fifth golf video game title with PGA Tour 2K23, and the team is well practised at refining its previous work and iterating on what has come before in meaningful ways. But how does the studio pick and choose exactly where to improve on the last entry without it being overwhelming? It listens to the people who have been playing the previous one, as Josh Muise explains. “We listen to community feedback
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