• hbdeveloper
• On March 19, 2015

After 3 or 4 weeks of me promising to make a news announcement, we were finally able to announce our partnership with Maximum Games and getting the game out on disk as a “Collector’s Edition”. This will be released in North and South America only at the moment but we’re in final discussions with a company in Europe to distribute the disk version in PAL regions such as Europe and NZ/Australia. It’s great news for us, since getting on the shelves in places like Target and Walmart will give us greater exposure and a bigger audience.

The reason for the delay in the news being released was that we couldn’t go public until we’d passed the concept stage with Microsoft. Unfortunately, GameStop, Amazon and a few others had it on their website before the announcement, so the news wasn’t very surprising when it finally did come out.

The whole concept process also delayed the March update we were putting out. We couldn’t confuse the concept process by putting an update in at the same time. Now that this is all approved, we’ve submitted the update so they’ll hopefully see the light of day in the next few days.

I’ve had a lot of questions about the disk version and the differences between the disk “Collectors Edition” and the digital version. So let me try and clear everything up for you.

The “Collector’s Edition” is:

• Current Digital Version with the March Update applied.
• Additional Season Mode.
• Tropical Theme.
• Collectors E-Book (which I don’t know much about as Maximum are sorting this out, and it’s all very secret).

We will then be releasing the May update for both Digital and Disk based customers. This will be a free update as usual, adding:

• Drop Balls.
• Out of Bounds.
• Improved Commentary for Tours and Tournament.
• More Commentary Variation.
• Default Drive Loft Setting.
• Cart Paths.
• Wind improvements.
• Rain Effects.
• Plus more (Dependent on time).

Also included within that is the option to buy the “Collector’s Edition” content with the exception of the E-Book, which is:

• Season Mode.
• Tropical Theme.
• And a bonus Asian Theme (we don’t have a name for this yet).

This is likely to be available for $10, but we’re still evaluating this at the moment.

The most common question we’ve had about the DLC is why does it take 3 weeks for our long term members to get feature parity with the “Collector’s Edition”? Unfortunately, this decision was out of our hands for a couple of reasons. For one, Sony and Microsoft have a set amount of time you have to wait after passing a new product before you can submit a feature update.

Suggested Courses

This week’s suggested courses are:

• Epson Grand V1 – Wendy445.
• Saxon Weald Golf Club – Antiparosjez.
• Eagleton Bend Resort – Coruler2.

Suggested Tournaments

I’ve also created a set of tournaments:

• HB Suggested Pro Cup – W4.
• 2 rounds at Epson Grand v1 (Handicap 0 or Better).
• HB Suggested Amateur Cup – W4.
• 2 rounds at Saxon Weald Golf Club (Handicap 1 or Worse).

• 4 rounds at Eagleton Bend Resort for players with a HC of 5 or better.

Until next week,

Anthony.