01 What Foresight Sports Premier Actually Is

Premier is Foresight Sports’ all-new golf simulator software, and it is the replacement for both FSX 2020 and FSX Play. Not a version bump and not a reskin — a separate platform built from the ground up, with new graphics, new features and a new interface, carrying both the practice experience and course play under one roof.

Existing software is not being switched off. FSX 2020 and FSX Play remain operational for the people using them today. Premier is where Foresight is taking the platform forward.

The framing in the preview is important: this is a development preview. Foresight provided the build specifically so it could be shown to the public, and there is a limited public beta already running. That is unusual. Most manufacturers hold a new software platform until it is polished. Foresight is doing the opposite, and doing it on purpose.

The reason is feedback. Foresight has committed to reading the comments on the first-look video and to acting on the notes raised in it. Features that are missing, interactions that feel wrong, options users want — all of it is being collected while the software is still soft enough to change.

02 The Subscription Model, And What FSX Owners Get

The headline business change: Premier is subscription-based. That is a real departure for anyone who bought into Foresight expecting a perpetual license.

Foresight is not leaving existing customers behind, though. Per the preview, current FSX software owners will be granted access at the lowest subscription tier and will retain access to the courses and content they already purchased. The intent described is that someone who bought a lifetime license lands in a better position than someone who bought a piece of hardware and is subscribing to the software cold.

What is not yet public: the tier names, the price points, or which features sit behind which tier. Course access in particular looks like a likely tiering lever, given how Foresight is structuring the course library (more on that below). Treat any specific pricing you see elsewhere as speculation until Foresight publishes it.

First-person view is a setup step, not a toggle

Premier supports a true first-person view, but it has to be calibrated. The software asks for the width of your screen, the height of your screen, any offset from the ground to the bottom of your image, the distance from the screen to the launch monitor, and the distance from the center of the hitting area to the front of the unit.

Enter those and the ball leaves your screen where you actually hit it. Skip the calibration and Premier falls back to a third-person view with the ball on screen — which is also the current default for shot analysis in this build.

03 Shot Analysis Is The Story Here

If one section of Premier justifies the whole rebuild, this is it. Shot analysis in this preview is dense, configurable, and clearly aimed at coaches, instructors and club fitters as much as at the practicing golfer. The read from the first look is blunt: this brings back what people missed when FSX 2020 gave way to FSX Play.

Targets you build yourself

The targets system is one of the more genuinely new pieces. Premier lets you place greens, bullseyes and landing zones at any yardage, either by typing the number in or by clicking and dragging. Landing zones suit driver and fairway practice; greens and bullseyes suit approach work.

You can nest them. Build a 30-yard green at 125 yards, drop a 12-yard bullseye inside it, then add quadrants to that bullseye if you want to work on a specific miss pattern. Deleting is as easy as placing.

Tagging and club comparison

Comparisons are built by starting a new club entry and attaching a tag to it. In the preview that meant logging a pitching wedge, then logging a second pitching wedge tagged “open stance” and hitting cut shots with it. The previous club’s dispersion stays on screen in a faded state so both patterns are visible at once.

The compare tab then puts the two side by side with carry or total distance, curvature, peak height, a 2D side view and a top view. In the preview that comparison surfaced a real, usable finding — the open-stance cut produced a noticeably tighter dispersion and pushed spin up into the 8,000 range on a pitching wedge that normally does not spin. That is the kind of thing a fitter charges for.

Swing video

Premier will support up to four video feeds, with two cameras selectable at once in this build, plus drawing tools. It is not limited to webcams — the preview ran a global shutter camera and Premier brought it in.

There is a real caveat, and it is a hardware one. Adjusting exposure and shutter speed to freeze a club head requires camera-specific drivers or plugins, which Premier does not carry for every camera. Foresight is reportedly weighing whether to import support for a few popular brands or to partner on and sell a known-good mid-grade camera with plugins included. Note also that the live preview does not appear until after the first recorded shot.

04 Course Play And The Course Library Strategy

The preview build ships with six courses, and Pebble Beach was used for the on-course walkthrough. Graphically it is a step forward from FSX Play — refined rough edges, 3D grass carried all the way through to the fringe, properly placed vegetation, drawn-in background detail, and dynamic clouds that visibly form and dissipate.

Greens now carry topography lines showing undulation and direction, which double as the putting read. Useful, though the preview flagged them as hard to read for speed, with a request for optional heat maps or moving lines as alternatives.

The two-tier course plan

This is the most strategically interesting thing Foresight disclosed. The course library is being built two ways at once:

Hand-finished courses. A set of flagship courses gone through with a fine-tooth comb and made as good as they can be. These roll out slowly.

Volume courses. On top of that, Foresight plans to port in large volumes of courses using a mapping system — identified in the preview as GolfLogix — which would put thousands of real courses in the library. These will not carry the same graphical polish, but they would let you play your local municipal track. Which tier sits behind which subscription level has not been announced.

05 Nine Holes At Pebble Beach: The Course Play Round

A second video followed the first look, and it is not a rehash. It is a full nine holes at Pebble Beach from the blue tees, close to 7,000 yards, played straight through in the development preview build. Where the first video walked the menus, this one stress-tests them.

Nine holes of course play in the Premier development preview, covering green reading, short game, bunkers, rough deductions and the flyover system.

What holds up

Distance rendering. The detail that sits far from the ball is doing real work — the beach, the ocean movement, the houses off in the distance, the clubhouse. On the high graphics preset the background is drawn out rather than faded, and it is a large part of why holes feel as big as they do at Pebble.

The flyover. Topography lines animate during the preview flyover, and the camera rises to show the green rather than orbiting it. That is a deliberate improvement over FSX Play, where the spin around the green was more motion than most people wanted.

Fairway behavior. Balls land and slow down in a way described as very realistic. The caveat is that firmness is not adjustable in this build — what you get behaves like a medium fairway, with no hard or soft setting.

Putting from the first cut. It works, and it reacts the way it should. The software distinguishes first cut from fringe, applies a deduction, and still lets you putt.

The green reading problem

Putting is where the round kept catching. The topography lines show direction and undulation, but they do not communicate speed in a way that reads quickly, and there is no stimp setting in this build to calibrate against — the greens felt like roughly a 10, with a downhill putt playing closer to 13.

The request stands from the first video and got louder here: give people a heat map option for green reading, or moving lines, or any of the alternate displays other sim software offers. Lines alone are a hard read for anyone who has not built up hours with them.

The spinning gimme circle got singled out too, and viewers of the first video flagged it independently. While you are trying to read the lines, a rotating circle in the middle of the picture is competing for your attention. The ask is simple: make it static, and let people turn it off.

Smaller things worth fixing

The ball dropping in the cup does not sound like a ball dropping in a cup — it is a thud. Sound may simply not have been worked on yet at this stage. Bunker physics drew a question mark when a ball landed in sand and bounced up and out. Grass reads as one uniform, manicured type across the whole course, where variation would sell it. Bunker edges run straight from turf to sand without the ring of dirt you see on a real lip. And the dynamic clouds, which are genuinely a nice touch, may be moving a little fast.

None of these are damning for a development preview. They are exactly the class of detail that gets fixed when someone reports them early, which is the entire reason Foresight put this build out.

06 What Is Missing, And What Was Already Flagged

Because this is a preview build shown expressly to gather feedback, the gaps matter as much as the features. Here is the running list from both videos — what is absent or needs changing, and what Foresight has said is already coming. This table gets updated as things ship.

07 Why This First Look Matters

Two things make this preview worth paying attention to beyond the feature list.

The first is that Foresight is genuinely soliciting input on a product that is still moving. The company has committed to reading comments on the first-look video and to weighing the specific notes raised in it. Every item in the table above is a live request, not a complaint filed into the void.

The second is what Premier signals about direction. FSX 2020 was beloved for its analysis depth. FSX Play advanced the visuals but left analysis users wanting. Premier replaces both, and it reads as the deliberate marriage of the two — if the development preview is this complete, the release version has real room to run.