EA Sports PGA Tour Golf Challenge takes its final swing on October 11

At the beginning of 2011, EA launched EA Sports PGA Tour Golf Challenge on Facebook (phew, that's a mouthful), and the game worked fairly well, giving players a constantly regenerating allotment of swings to practice on the game's golf courses and allowing players to outfit their golfers with the best outfits and golf clubs that money (both virtual and real) can buy. Unfortunately, the game never rocketed to the top of the charts, and EA has officially announced that the game will be closing permanently later this year.

The news comes by way of EA's service updates page, which lets us know that EA Sports PGA Tour Golf Challenge will shut down on October 11. Considering that the game currently sits at just 20,000 players, the news doesn't come as a shock, although it does leave us to wonder about the future of other Facebook sports games in the EA catalog, like Madden NFL Superstars or EA Sports FIFA Superstars, which currently sit at 270,000 and 1.9 million monthly active users each, according to AppData. If anything, FIFA will probably remain active for quite some time, as a number of over 1 million monthly active players is still definitely impressive, but that low number for Madden NFL Superstars is concerning.

As for PGA Tour Golf Challenge, the game's Facebook fan page fell silent long ago, and we're still working on determining what (if anything) will be given to players as a consolation for the closure. We'll update this space as we learn more. Stay tuned!

Are you sad to see PGA Tour Golf Challenge close? Which sports game is your favorite on Facebook? Sound off in the comments!