Le Tour avec Zwift in game

IRL we know it was 8 stages of great racing and I can only guess at the marketing budget that Zwift spent on “avec zwift” but in game I can’t help but think about all of the effort that they used to put out for various worlds and giro courses. It seems like it would have been a natural fit to include La Planche des Belles Filles or something from with women’s Tour in the game. Maybe on the backside of Ventop, the Alpe or something like that without creating a whole new world?

Just speculating here, but my guess is that marketing the product does more for recurring revenue than adding routes or worlds, and it doesn’t dilute the product by spreading users over more roads, which lessens the excitement of crowds. Plus marketing doesn’t require a lot of development work by their (recently reduced) engineering team - it’s mostly done by people who don’t develop the game, and can be outsourced to some extent. Developers are expensive and hard to hire quickly. I imagine Zwift is thinking that it’s better to acquire new users at a time when competition from other products is increasing. To those new users, the entire Zwift universe is new, so they don’t care about new routes. They can probably acquire those users much more quickly than the churn associated with losing customers to competitors, since they are still the market leader. The one thing that surprises me a bit is that the TdF Femmes avec Zwift didn’t come with an annual subscription plan promotion to lock users into paying for every month and sticking around for a year while competitors are trying to woo them away.

As an existing Zwift user, I’d love to see your suggestion in action - more novel routes in existing worlds that expand on the road network rather than rehashing existing roads.

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