This is a big deal, if not because of the actual lost opportunity, but because of larger branding effects.
First, EA lost NCAA football. Now, they’ve lost Tiger Woods. The good news is that as long as they’ve still got John Madden, FIFA, and the NHL in the fold, EA will remain synonymous with quality sports video games.
However, EA doesn’t have MLB, isn’t winning NBA, MMA, tennis, or auto racing, and though it still owns boxing for now, Fight Night’s potential keeps dropping alongside the real-life sport’s popularity.
All that’s to say: if EA loses Tiger and, thus, its golf-on-console dominance, that’s just one more sport in which EA’s no longer in the game.
(PS: I want a studio to make a series of sports games that all take place in a singular fictional world. That is, create a pro football game with 32 fictional teams. And then, when the studio creates a pro baseball game with 30 fictional teams, it would be in that same world, perhaps with the same lead broadcaster. Bring a Rockstar Games attitude to the commentary and off-field gameplay, and I think you’d have something. The magic trick, of course, would be to create a compelling enough in-game experience to overcome consumers’ apparent feeling that “reality” is the only thing worth playing in the sports-game world.)
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