Tiger Woods, at the Virtual Tee First
The first time I met Tiger Woods, in 2005, I was shocked to find myself talking to a real person.
Standing in a deserted Sheep Meadow in Central Park, he waved off his handful of P.R. people, and we spent about 15 minutes just talking about video games. Personable, gregarious and altogether down to earth, he lighted up as he told me how much he enjoyed the Socom special forces games because his father had been a soldier.
The second time I met Tiger Woods, last June, I couldn’t find that guy. Sitting in the atrium of the Nike Store on 57th Street with cameras and handlers and microphones everywhere, he looked me straight in the eye and told me that sadly he didn’t play video games much any more because he was too busy spending time with his wife and children.
I bought it, just as millions of people around the world bought into the image he was selling. Over the years something changed.
What has not changed is that Tiger Woods is still the best golfer on the planet, and that appears to be all that matters to Electronic Arts, as the company prepares to release Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online on Tuesday.
Accenture and Gatorade have dropped him, and you don’t even see Nike, which has stood by him, promoting a new line of Tiger Woods products this week as he returns to professional golf at the Masters. But Electronic Arts, with voluminous market research on its side, has determined that the 40-year-old male office worker and golfer who is the target consumer for Tiger Woods Online simply does not care about Mr. Woods’s serial infidelity — or doesn’t care enough that the drumbeat of tawdry revelations will stop him from buying the game.
And perhaps it should not stop him, because Tiger Woods Online is a fabulous game. Millions and millions of hours of work will be lost forever because of it, which is the highest praise a game of this sort can earn. Unlike the company’s previous Tiger Woods PGA Tour games for consoles and PCs, you don’t need to go to a store or order anything to play. You just go to tigerwoodsonline.ea.com, install a browser plug-in and then decide if you want to tee off at Pebble Beach, St. Andrews or any of the other courses in the game.
You can play free or you can subscribe for access to additional features like custom tournaments with your friends. Electronic Arts has clearly learned something from the success of Facebook games like Mafia Wars in terms of developing a business model that is meant to lure people in with a free tier before convincing them to shell out some cash. (While the game does not include advertising at the moment, it may in the future.)
“We think this will be a productivity killer,” Peter Moore, president of EA Sports, said in an interview on Friday. He has good reason to be proud. Tiger Woods Online is an important game for him, his company and for the sports video-game genre generally.
Electronic Arts has sold more than 25 million copies since the series was introduced in 1999. The budget for the new online game was several million dollars, Mr. Moore said, which is inexpensive for a big-name game. The company also intends to introduce a new Tiger Woods console game in June.
As is his wont, Mr. Moore was extremely candid about the realities involved in creating and selling this game. While Accenture was trying to associate itself with an image of Tiger Woods as a person (“We know what it takes to be a Tiger”), the Tiger Woods golf games are strictly about Mr. Woods as an athlete.
“When you’re in the world that we’re in, dealing with these celebrities and athletes who are incredibly wealthy, you’ve got to be able to have somewhat of a thick skin in order to make difficult decisions from time to time,” Mr. Moore said. “Accenture is a business services company that is looking to bring its services to life. But Tiger Woods wasn’t actually involved in the product. He wasn’t wandering around making PowerPoint presentations in boardrooms. He wasn’t doing cost-benefit analyses for companies who are in trouble meeting their P&L targets.”
“For us, Tiger Woods is the product,” Mr. Moore added. “He is absolutely embedded in the game. He’s not just on the front of the product. It’s not 50 golfers, and he’s one of them. He has been absolutely integral to so many parts of this, and that is different from a hired gun who can be used interchangeably.” Mr. Moore added that the company never wavered on releasing the product, and that the development team did not pause for a single day of work.
All that said, one of the main attractions of Tiger Woods Online is that you, the player, create your own middle-aged avatar and then guide your virtual persona through the ranks of golfdom. You start out only able to play effectively from the shortest tees and then improve your distance and other golf skills until you can eventually play from the longest ones. As with real golf, the new game sucks you in through an alternately rewarding and maddening experience.
The graphics are not on par with the most advanced console or PC games, but they are still quite attractive and impressive for a game played through a Web browser. (Look Ma, no discs!)
Electronic Arts, like the rest of the game industry, is trying to position itself for a future when games (and other entertainment products) are delivered not on physical media but via the Internet. Tiger Woods Online is an excellent start, but it is a bit of a shame that it comes with so much baggage because of Mr. Woods’s personal behavior.
As for Mr. Woods himself, I hope he is playing more video games these days. And I hope that if I meet him a third time, he will tell me all about it, one real gamer — and one real person — to another.
