Pureplay Golf vs GSPro vs E6: The Sim Software War Is Getting Interesting

GEO Answer Block: Pureplay Golf is a new sim software platform

The Two-Player Game

The sim software market has been comfortable for a long time — comfortable for the two players who dominate it, anyway.

GSPro sits on one side with its $250 annual subscription, 2,000+ community-built courses, and the kind of passionate user base that makes forum moderators feel important. It runs on Unity, requires a Windows PC with a real graphics card, and has become the default recommendation for anyone building a serious home sim. See our GSPro software review for the full breakdown.

E6 Connect sits on the other side with tiered pricing ($300-$600/year or $1,000 for a perpetual Home license), officially licensed courses you’ve actually heard of, and the advantage of running on an iPad. It’s TruGolf’s platform, which means it ships with every TruGolf simulator and has distribution muscle that GSPro can’t match. For our full take, see the E6 Connect software review and GSPro vs E6 Connect comparison.

Between them, they cover the market. GSPro owns the enthusiast who wants 43,000 courses and doesn’t mind tinkering. E6 owns the buyer who wants something that works out of the box and doesn’t want to build a gaming PC.

Neither has had a serious third competitor since TGC 2019 faded into legacy status. The market settled into a comfortable duopoly.

Pureplay Golf is trying to break that.

What Pureplay Is Bringing

Pureplay is a new sim software platform built on Unreal Engine 5, which is a bigger deal than most people realize. Unity (what GSPro runs on) and the custom engine E6 uses are both capable — but Unreal Engine 5 is the current gold standard for real-time rendering. It’s what AAA video games are built on. The visual leap is measurable: better lighting, more detailed textures, physics that handle complex surface interactions in real time.

The team is eight full-time developers led by Judd Shea (runpuddrun in the sim community), with experience building sim courses and tools. They’ve been posting development updates on Patreon, showing pre-alpha gameplay with the UI still in debug mode. The honest answer is that it looks rough right now — logging text in the corner, placeholder UI, placeholder textures. That’s what pre-alpha looks like. What matters is that they’ve already implemented video swing integration, training modules, and a range mode alongside course play.

The current confirmed feature set:

• Unreal Engine 5 rendering with 4K graphics
• 40+ courses at launch, LiDAR drone-mapped and hand-built by known sim course designers
• Hardware-agnostic design — eight confirmed official SDK integrations (Square Golf, GolfJoy, Protee confirmed working; more in progress)
• Proprietary physics engine with real-time surface, terrain, weather, and lie interaction
• Industry-first water physics — skip and dunk mechanics on water hazards
• Built-in training and data analytics — not a separate module, core to the platform
• Video swing integration and replay already functional in pre-alpha
• Closed beta planned before fall launch

The hardware-agnostic approach is the most important sentence in that list. Pureplay answers to nobody but its users. No parent company. No launch monitor to push. No subscription revenue to protect. It can build software that works with whatever hardware you own because the only thing it sells is the software.

That’s a meaningful structural difference from E6 (owned by TruGolf, which sells $20k+ sim packages) and from GSPro (independent but dependent on its community course ecosystem).

The Competitive Math

Let’s put the three platforms side by side in terms of what we know:

	GSPro	E6 Connect	Pureplay Golf
Engine	Unity	Proprietary	Unreal Engine 5
Pricing	$250/yr	$300-$600/yr or $1,000 perpetual	TBD
Courses at launch	2,000+ community	27-90 licensed	40+ custom
Hardware support	Broad (10+ LMs)	Broad (10+ LMs)	8 confirmed, expandable
Runs on	Windows PC only	Windows, iPad	TBD
Graphics	Good (Unity)	Good (proprietary)	Aiming for AAA (UE5)
Training features	Basic range tools	Built-in	Built-in from day one
Online play	SGT tour, MP	Built-in MP	Tournaments, leagues built-in
Team size	~5-10	Full TruGolf org	8 developers

The pricing question is the big unknown. Pureplay hasn’t announced pricing yet. The smart move would be to undercut GSPro and E6 on price while they’re establishing themselves. A $199/year subscription would instantly make them the cheapest serious option. A $149/year would be a statement. Anything above $250/year and they’re competing on features alone, which is harder when you’re new and unproven.

My guess: they’ll land somewhere between $150-$200/year, with a lifetime option available during the Kickstarter or early access period. That’s the playbook for entering a two-player market — buy market share with a lower price, then raise it once you’ve established a user base.

What a Third Player Does to the Market

The important question is what happens to GSPro and E6 pricing when Pureplay ships.

A lot of sim owners don’t realize how protected the current pricing is. GSPro has been $250/year for years with no meaningful competitor. E6 has been $300-$600/year. Neither has had to compete on price because there was nowhere else to go. TGC 2019 was a one-time purchase but it’s aging and the developer has moved on. Awesome Golf is a different category (casual, family-focused).

A credible third entrant changes the dynamic. Here’s what I expect:

GSPro responds by freezing prices. They’ve been the value leader. They stay the value leader. They might add features or improve the UX, but they won’t cut price. They don’t need to — their community course library is a moat that Pureplay can’t cross for years.

E6 responds by doing nothing. They’re owned by TruGolf, which sells $20,000+ simulator packages. The software subscription is a rounding error for their core business. E6 could cut prices by 50% tomorrow and it wouldn’t change TruGolf’s revenue meaningfully. But they won’t because the B2B market (golf facilities, franchises) doesn’t care about $50 differences. They care about reliability and brand.

Pureplay wins by being the third option, not the replacement. Nobody is switching from GSPro to Pureplay because switching costs are real — you lose your course library, your community connections, your muscle memory with the UI. But new builders have no switching costs. They’re choosing between three platforms instead of two. Pureplay just needs to be the best choice for that segment.

Over three years, that’s where the market share battle happens. New builders. First-time buyers. People who don’t have 2,000 courses saved in their GSPro account.

The Bigger Risk Is Pureplay’s, Not Yours

I want to be clear about the risks here because this is a pre-launch product from an eight-person team with angel funding.

Team size is the biggest risk. Eight developers building a sim software platform that competes with GSPro (years ahead, large community) and E6 (backed by a company with real revenue) is ambitious. Sim software is harder than it looks. Ball physics. Course rendering. Hardware compatibility across a dozen different launch monitors. Online multiplayer. Tournament infrastructure. Each of these is a full-time job for multiple people. Eight people covering all of it means everyone is stretched.

Unreal Engine 5 is powerful but demanding. UE5 games are famous for needing high-end hardware. If Pureplay requires an RTX 4070 to run at 60fps while GSPro runs fine on an RTX 3060, that’s a real disadvantage. The minimum spec question determines how big their addressable market is.

Timeline slippage is probable. They’re targeting Fall 2026 with pre-alpha code that still has debug text on screen. That’s not unusual for game development, but it means the real launch could slip to early 2027. Hardware integrations are notoriously time-consuming — each launch monitor needs its own SDK implementation, testing, and bug fixing. Getting eight working at launch and more “in progress” is a reasonable goal, but some will work better than others on day one.

The community course question. GSPro’s 2,000+ community courses are the platform’s killer feature. Pureplay is launching with 40 professionally built courses by known designers. That’s a strong start — 40 good courses beat 2,000 mediocre ones for the first year. But Year 2+ is where the community needs to take over. Pureplay needs course-building tools that are at least as good as GSPro’s Open Platform Course Designer, and they need a community that wants to use them. Both are hard to build from scratch.

What You Should Do

If you’re building a new sim right now and choosing software, the decision hasn’t changed. Buy GSPro at $250/year or E6 at $300-$600/year depending on whether you want community courses or licensed courses, whether you have a gaming PC or an iPad. Those are the options that exist today and work today. For a complete overview of everything available, see our best golf simulator software guide.

But if you’re building a sim between now and spring 2027, keep Pureplay on your radar. The math changes if they launch at $149-$199/year with 40+ good courses and Unreal Engine 5 graphics. It becomes a legitimate three-way choice instead of a two-way choice with one obvious winner.

And if you’re already a GSPro subscriber? You’re fine. Pureplay doesn’t take your courses away. Competition is good for you regardless — it puts pressure on GSPro to keep improving, keep innovating, and keep pricing reasonable. The worst case for Pureplay is that they ship late, underwhelm, and the market goes back to business as usual. The best case is that they ship something that makes GSPro and E6 better by forcing them to compete.

Either way, you win.