Zwift going primetime: What are your hopes and fears?

[Michael_Fulton (Michael)]

With the big news that our favorite sweat-inducing exercise video game is about to get mainstream, primetime media coverage all over the planet, what are some of your hopes and fears for the platform? Feel free to add your own!

My hopes:
-Brings even more people on board
-More income for Zwift
-Broad-scale acceptance of eSports, pushing coverage off of twitch and more into the mainstream channels.
-Broader acceptance in the biking world. There still seems to be a stigma that riding on zwift is not as hard as outdoors. I do not know about others, but I do know that 2 hours on zwift feels like a 3 1/2 hour outdoor ride to me.

My fears:
-Group rides: I love group rides, however they are in an awkard spot right now. The fence was perfect, but its been gone for months. In addition, I have been on group rides where Zwift sends half the group in some random direction…I have a fear that people will see zwift, learn about it, sign up and do a group ride for there first experience, and just see people flying off the front, riders falling off the back left and right, and the group being split to pieces by auto-navigation.

-Sandbagging: This could make it exponentially worse without real controls

-Bloat. The UI is not good for trying to manage talking to your friends when there are tens of thousands of other riders also online. Its a mess and not ready for prime time. I know there is an update coming, but it needs to happen asap

Thats just my brief thoughts. Please feel free to add your own!

[Ben_Brawn_HVR (Ben)]

My fear is it will not win any new zwifters.

[Andrew_Fielden]

@Michael_Fulton

-Broader acceptance in the biking world. There still seems to be a stigma that riding on zwift is not as hard as outdoors.

Maybe if your outdoor experience is Étape du Tour, but riding indoors definitely gets me sweating enough to keep fit.

[JerryC-137 (Jerry)]

My fear is more Zwifters.

Routes that are too crowded (i.e New York), where it seems you are jammed in the middle of a weekday lunch rush and graphics are lagging because of overloaded servers. A sufficient warning of this would be back in the final days of AOL, when it took off like a rocket, but people suddenly found they could not get online because of upgrades that were forced by the surge in traffic.

[Dave_ZPCMR (Dave)]

TdF is as high profile as it gets but I’m not convinced it’ll generate more custom for Zwift than the widespread advertisement we’ve seen for ages combined with an absolutely unprecedented global lockdown. It’s not even being shown live in the UK, so besides some yellow stuff it’s little different to the Tour for All. It all still feels like an promo for Zwift rather than a legitimate competition. I’m sure we’ll be given facts and figures at the end that show it was all worth it though, the marketing bods basically have to make it so.

Everyone interested in cycling and pro racing was surely already aware of the platform and will have tried it over the last couple of months if they didn’t already have a subscription. My hope is that once the TdF wet dream is over (and with the Olympics postponed until next year), Zwift will get back to focussing on the demographic that actually props up the platform month on month. I think DCR described it very well:

There’s also the reality that, based largely on self-inflicted communications stumbles this past weekend, a lot of Zwifters are still asking for more focus on current aspects of the game. Teams have been promised for nearly a year, and it’s been three months since the team beta rolled out with no visible expansion beyond a single beta team. And while the new worlds do benefit regular Zwifters, the Tour de France race partnership has brought up questions again on whether Zwift is a software company that services its paying end users, or a media company for occasional race sponsorships. Sometimes those two overlap well, whereas other times their goals appear at odds with each other.