14 DAY TRIAL // Working with celebrities to promote or base your entire product on is a two-edged sword. The benefits are instant, as the public acknowledgment the celebrity has is almost entirely transferred to the product, but at the same time, all the negative things are also assigned.
Everything runs smooth as silk until said celebrity is exposed to the world as being nothing more than a common man, with faults and weaknesses. One celebrity that has recently unveiled his “faulty by human nature” existence is Tiger Woods, but unlike most of the companies that have had collaboration contracts with the golfer, the gaming industry stuck to its guns, and didn't cut its ties with “the tiger.”
Currently, EA Sports is working hard on their next golfing simulator, and they're not about to scrape the project just because the front man for the game got in a little scuffle with the moral committee. Peter Moore, EA Sports' boss, updated his blog with details concerning the upcoming Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online, and also took the opportunity to express EA's support for the golfer.
“Our relationship with Tiger has always been rooted in golf,” Moore said. “We didn't form a relationship with him so that he could act as an arm's length endorser. Far from it. We chose to partner with Tiger in 1997 because we saw him as the world's best, most talented and exciting golfer. We struck that partnership with the assumption that he would remain near or at the top of his sport for years to come.”
Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online is one of EA Sports’ new pet projects, and it announces itself as a very innovative game. It has been in a closed beta stage for eight months now and has had over 75,000 gamers fiddling with the mechanics and looking for programming misses. While eight months is quite a long period of beta testing, even for an online game, hopefully, this will lead to a somewhat bug-less release this January, that won't require daily patches and updates.
As for the game itself, Moore believes it will bring something entirely new to the gaming table. “Tiger Woods PGA TOUR Online is a breakthrough experience - golfers will love the authentic feel of the course and gamers will be struck by the detail and smooth flow of the browser based experience,” he explained. “We have spent considerable time developing and testing this game; we’re proud of it; and we are releasing it in open beta later this month.”