Im loving Zwift Island, but there is surely much much more in the pipeline. Whats next? Is there an expected roll out date for the non-beta/full version? Im sure Zwift would love to be getting a membership fee from us all…
My guess (I’d love to be surprised) is that Zwift are not likely to be specific about a target ship date. As a purely personal opinion, I’d like to see Zwift focused on fundamental bugs with the physics, graphics, etc rather than adding on features like powerups.
I know that ship has sailed now but it was still surprising to me that Zwift chose to add a feature like powerups (which takes time to develop and will introduce more bugs that need to be fixed, hence getting ship date further away) and extending to Mac support. I’d really like to see a laser-like focus on the basic platform, without any major bugs (I get that bugs always exist) and THEN add new features.
I opened a thread on this a while back: https://support.zwift.com/hc/communities/public/questions/201441819-Shipping-it-vs-adding-features?locale=en-us
To reiterate, if Zwift fixed the core bugs in the platform and shipped the functionality that exists today I will absolutely pay my $10 per month as, I suspect, thousands of others would too.
Just one perspective.
Mark
I’d be willing to start a membership if I could start writing my own structured workouts.
We constantly choose to add features and try things out because learning and experimentation is a major goal for this period of time.
To be honest, it’s not that interesting that some people’s computer crashes or that there are bugs here. We know about most bugs before we even release the software. They are to be expected, and while this is the time to fix them it’s also the time we have to learn about what works and what doesn’t. Users will be much less forgiving about just about everything once we start charging for the service.
Generally the way updates roll out are in a tick-tock fashion, with one update adding features, and the next fixing bugs. In this way we split our time and move the entire platform forward.
PS, Powerups used about 6 hours of developer time and a similar amount of artist time. No major fixes were delayed because of it, but I’d bet we learned quite a bit from their deployment.
is the current zwift island the ‘final’ one, asside from ongoing improvements? And again, what sort of time frame are you looking at opening up the server?
It needs more maps and workouts before people will start putting down real money for this.
I bet most of us have trainnerroad and maybe another app already and to add on another 10$ to have a social ride around a 5 miles loop seems a bit aggressive IMO.
The beta is great as just a beta, but I need workouts and more and longer maps before I will switch over.