Zwift is a (super) great service for biking during the winter months.
My (and perhaps others with me) only problem is that the PC you need to get a good experience is not anything that you have at home any more. Sure teenagers have gaming computers. But the rest? Who buys a 1500 $ machine for a single purpose? Then it’s outdated 36 months later…
Today many use their smart phones or tablets for everyday “computing” at home.
High end PC at home is not common anymore.
So… if you cannot optimize a version of Zwift to 2016 ipad/android.
Perhaps you can optimize it to the Playstation 4 or Xbox? The are designed for gaming, has a usb for the ant dongle. And millions of people have them at home.
As you do not make any money on the hardware sales. It would be in your interest to be able to offer your service on the platforms that are common and achievable in/for the private households.
It would be nice to have Zwift on the consoles but I suspect there is a whole lot of extra hassle writing software for a console compared to the PC. Not least the consoles have vigorous certification and testing procedures when ever you want to release an update. I would also imagine the consoles server network topology would make it difficult to ride cross platform and you might find your self not able to ride with PC Zwifters.
Developing for the PC gives control to Zwift, developing for the consoles takes a lot of that control away.
it would be nice but I just cant see it happening but would love to be proved wrong.
As an alternative I can recommend an Alienware Alpha as lower cost gaming PC that works well with Zwift for $449. I run Zwift at 1080p on my i3 Alpha and its great. It runs Zwift as well as the consoles might expect to and can function as a general purpose PC, light gaming or media PC as well.
As Mark has just pointed out, you don’t need a $1500 PC to run Zwift well.
I have a $600 machine that I custom built, just for Zwift, and it runs Zwift beautifully. It’s a Core i3, 8 GB RAM, nVidia GeForce GTX 950, 256 GB SATA III SSD.
C64 request is funny. But seriously, let’s stop with the silly requests for PS4/XBox versions of Zwift. Devs have a enough to work on for the foreseeable future without us asking for ports. Maybe one day Zwift could get there but for now everyone would like to see Zwift build its feature set and user base first.
Michael - re “silly requests”… it might help grow the user base if they decided to cater for people like me who drive their AV through the PS4… just saying…
I think this would be a good idea too. I tried running Zwift on my 5 year old Macbook air and it is a pretty horrible experience. Have to turn everything right down. The iOS app on my iPhone 6plus is definitely a step up, but you can see there has been some sacrificing of detail and texture to suit the mobile market.
So, I too am looking at building a PC to host Zwift and also act as a general media server which is something I want anyway. Struck me that my PS4 however would make a great platform to run Zwift on, but of course at the moment there is no way to achieve this. Anything in the pipeline for consoles or is this one dead in the water for the reasons stated above?