Controversial topic here possibly but my daughter got a free U16 account setup a few years ago but is about to turn 16. Whilst she is a very occasional cyclist, my son who is now 9 is a mad wee rider and wants to zwift over the winter to keep riding even if its indoors over the winter months.
I just spotted that new U16 accounts are now no longer accepted. Loads of reasons given due to privacy laws etc among other things. I still think there is a perfectly good and reasonable argument to reintroduce the platform for U16 so I want to see this reintroduced as a feature going forward.
I don’t think this should be controversial at all.
Zwift put some pretty good “guardrails” on the U16 accounts with disabling messaging. I don’t know what residual risk they felt was too high to keep doing this.
The vast majority of the U16 accounts were set up and not used a lot, basically being just exposure. I don’t see how it cost Zwift much in terms of accounts not being paid for unless there was rampant fraud, but somehow I doubt it.
Yeah, completely agree. I found the logic difficult since there are many “U16” players on Fortnite these days and epic games has no issues there nor gets any grief from regulatory authorities. It’s a free to play platform. Can’t see why we cant have the next generation of Zwifters / Cyclists getting onboard and growing the user base for years to come. Certainly Zwift offers a far more health promoting window to online gaming through cycling for kids and I would have thought zwift would be all for promoting this.
This is the way it was with my kid. She only used Zwift infrequently, once a month (or less). But when she did use it she would go more than 25km and do a proper ride. If she ever asked to go on Zwift I was always really excited to say “YES!”. It’s not really worth it for me to buy a monthly membership for her when she uses it so sparingly, but having the option available once in a while was really nice and maybe would have eventually got her hooked on indoor riding.
