EA has announced a delay for its upcoming PGA Tour game, pushing it back from a spring 2022 release window to an unspecified later date.
There’s no reason for the delay, outside of EA simply noting that it had been delayed in a financial statement and saying that “We’re excited to bring championship golf to you and will be providing more information on our launch plans in the coming months,” it said.
EA Sports PGA Tour is set to release for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, building on the Frostbite game engine and aiming to take advantage of the new generation consoles’ power. Developer EA Tiburon has also employed new aerial scanning techniques to capture millions of data points from across the Augusta National course to recreate it in as much detail as possible in game.
Having starred Tiger Woods as the face of their golf franchise between 1998 and 2013, EA has gone without a golf game since Rory McIlroy PGA Tour in 2015. That game was their one and only entry on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, leaving a vacuum of golf games that went unfilled by a licensed game until HB Studios’ The Golf Club series picked up the PGA Tour license in 2018. That game series morphed into PGA Tour 2K21 with last year’s release, but sporting rights are a tricky field to navigate, and 2K’s non-exclusive license left the door open for EA to announce the return of EA Sports PGA Tour in March of this year.
Since then, EA has gone after more major licensing deals, snagging the rights to feature all four Majors in their game, which could be a major boon to the new game’s appeal. Meanwhile, 2K Games is still producing their own PGA Tour licensed game, and has managed to go back and secure Tiger Woods’ likeness in a long-term exclusive deal.
