Golden Tee PGA Tour Now Officially Shipping

This might be a little confusing as back in February I ran a story mentioning that Golden tee PGA Tour by Incredible Technologies had begun shipping but it appears that the official “ship day” for it was today. Here’s a video that was livestreamed to celebrate this official event:

So why the disparity? It comes down to the game going through a soft launch earlier this year, where a small number of units went out to locations, in part for testing. Today would then be the hard launch.

One change with the game that is helping them reach this goal is no longer including a 55″ 4K TV with the purchase, since the cost and availability of those has made it rather difficult for a production like this to reach their goals. It really shouldn’t be much of an issue for those planning on getting a Golden Tee anyways – once the Showcase cabinet model was introduced back in 2007, this has been the modus operandi for Golden Tee ever since. Ops just need to be sure to get a TV that’s 55″ and is 4K, since that’s what the game was specifically designed for – if you cheap out with some 1080p model, it’ll look like hot garbage and if games do that, they won’t earn as well.

This does make me curious if any other manufacturers might take this approach in the future, although it would mean that the cabinets will need to be redesigned from what we’ve normally seen. I am also curious if this change affects the selling price of GTPGA at all, although I haven’t seen what they had been listing for yet.

What do you think – excited to finally see GT add the PGA Tour license and use more modern graphics instead of looking like a bargain bin PS2 game?