Andrew,
The think you are right about what average users might want. But let’s look at Roblox.
Market cap of $16 billion, they did something incredibly right. Roblox was released in 2006. They scaled by growing a user base, and November 2015 launched on X-Box 1. September 25th, they just acquired Speechly, AI voice chat moderator platform.
Visualizations on Roblox are now fantastic. Kids spend hours each weekend on the program building player shared environments. I remember my son loved this game, moved onto Minecraft, even more robust, fantastic visualizations now moving to full ray tracing.
Zwift focused on racing in Europe, and in the United States and China, cultures where people actually do bike, the most advanced manufacturing and software development cultures in the world, people generally don’t race bikes, don’t watch bike racing, and simply kids don’t challenge each other to a race. Rather in America, kids want a mountain bike to bomb downhill, so the e-bike is taking off, and women biked on Pelaton to specifically lose weight, that was it. Zwift offered no weight loss program, no social interaction around nutrition or health, they were locked into group racing, that was the DNA.
Well 2023, MyWoosh paid for the UCI license, and targeted Europe for the virtual race, then surprisingly, Australia and South America built out, Arabia was to be expected. MyWoosh paid their Unreal fees, not a problem, they are not charging, but there still is cross revenue, but MyWoosh does not care, they pay Unreal to establish nice relationships, that’s the United Emigrates way, pay to play.
Zwift still has the advantage to unlock user creativity, no different than Roblox, build solid relationships based on shared coding of a virtual world, with fascinating elements, fascinating visuals. That’s still out there, and with all that hard work and group effort, return to KKR on Sandhill Road, and say, see, we made good on our promise, we did it through our users, we empowered our users to contribute any and every idea, we owe it to them, users that pushed us back to the technology limit, back to where we started with new cutting edge ideas, risks, rewards, and innovations, not just biking stationary in virtual circles.
Everyone is taking about AI because it’s AI time in Silicon Valley, every company needs ‘AI’ whether I am for AI or not.
In the gaming space, AI takes about three or four forms:
- Superior ray traced visual showcases, (Cyberpunk, etc)
- In game NPC activity, (Sims, Bethesda Software)
- In game level content generation (Dead Cell, Hades)
- In game dialogue and storyline outcome (Starfield, Baldurs Gate 3)
My guess, a three year window, MyWoosh is gearing up, they have deep pockets, money to advertise and induce user growth, world development, copycat-ing, but eventually extremely improved visuals and casual gaming with real world trophies, like real money on a Tuesday night race, or a gift bag, or tickets to a real world biking event. They also have the benefit of a real Sports Franchise affiliation of the Emigrates, a professional showcase team, that serves the entire purpose of Zwift Academy, real world training, for real world class athletes, that complete globally in real world races. You can call it sportwashing, but all of this is Corporate Sponsorship 101.
My point, visualizations at the high end are absolutely critical because Zwift will be on roadshows, and the Zwift platform will be compared 100 percent of the time to a high end trainer, perhaps the latest and greatest Wahoo bike, it’s super seamless, with a high end PC computer, an RTX 4090, I9, 32 GB of memory, 120 frames per second 4k screens, with pretty models helping everyone at the convention trying out the platform for themselves.
That’s the future of MyWoosh for the next three years, Toyota, Lexus, Kia, GM, Ford, everyone that sells anything related to transportation always had the same plan, you show up to the convention all prepared, your best consumer models, pretty super model helpers, glossy brochures, you are there to market, to sell units, to launch new features, year after year. Apple does this every year, lots of fan fair, never misses a beat, the A17 processor it’s so fast, it has AI and a Dynamic Island!
Bottom line, Roblox rallied, consistently attracted new users, one user aged out, two new little kids joined. Never a complaint from a single parent, lots of online communication.
Roblox: 1,443,889 Players Online
Zwift: 2,527 on Watopia, 329 on Makura, 99 on Yorkshire, 451 London, about 4,000 concurrent users on line right now.
Roblox during school hours had 350x more users. It’s between two and three orders of magnitude different. If you try Garmin’s biking application, my guess, they have about 500 users at most right now globally, and it’s not a concurrent MMO system overall.
The largest challenge with the Forums has been the very common practice of blaming the messenger. The deeper reality, Zwift has to answer to its key investor on Sandhill Road and jump start the creativity. I’m just being honest, it seems MyWoosh right now is gearing up to copy and simply has all its financial ducks in a row.
Gary
