@lolwhat1234 wrote:
This game was delayed by a full year and when it launched, yet still had game breaking bugs like green beads that moved in the wrong direction and presented incorrect pin distances. Almost a year later the game is still getting little quality of life fixes and bug fixes that really should've been there since the start. There's little significance to people changing jobs in this industry anyway, but it's hardly a great loss.
I'd usually 100% agree with you, but per his LinkedIn, Justin Patel was an EA employee for almost 13 years, and worked on the last FIVE golf games from EA Sports. And he left EA just a month after EA Sports PGA Tour came out, and officially joined 2K/HB Studios just four months later.
The timing seems pretty interesting to me. The fact that he kept working with EA thru the last 3 Tiger Woods games (which are held in pretty high regards in most circles), thru Rory, and then still stuck around to see this most recent game to light (as a "Senior Game Designer/Design Lead for all in-game features") shows that he was a pretty loyal worker in an industry that doesn't seem to have much of that.
And now he works for the direct competition, joining them less than 6 months after the big return of EA golf on next-gen consoles. Maybe I am reading way too much into it, but leaving the company and high-tailing it to the competitor looks like he was trying to get off a potential sinking ship, knowing what the future of this game and the EA PGA series was gonna look like.
This is, of course, all speculation. But it just seems strange that someone who's been a part of EA golf for over a decade made such a quick change in jobs (joining the "other" golf game developer, at that) right after one of the most anticipated golf game releases ever.
