We have no plans to change our current subscription pricing.
The primary goal for this fundraise is to allow us to accelerate our investment in the core product - bringing better, more immersive experiences. We have lots of exciting plans in the works, but we can’t tell you just yet.
This investment allows us to accelerate the growth of our core product team. Having more personnel allows us to expand our technical capabilities.
This funding will help us accelerate the development of the core product, invest in new development and integration of tools like ZwiftPower. We’ve also been quietly improving our Events and Clubs functionality. Projects like this directly improve Zwift for our community racers, social riders and runners.
This one’s way above my pay grade, and we can’t comment on future strategic decisions anyway.
This will allow us to make faster headway on making Zwift more inclusive for all with avatars representing a broader range of ethnicities, genders, and ages, as well as the long-standing request to represent adaptive athletes with avatars, events and accessibility features.
However - the new UI we’d planned on releasing in March is on hold. We’d been knitting that sweater for a really long time prior to COVID, but the operational changes we made to scale up to the huge spike in usage means we outgrew that sweater. Growing the core product team will help us knit a new one sooner.
We hear your frustrations. What we can say is this investment will enable us to bring products to market quicker and more efficiently.
Announcing our roadmap sounds a lot like giving our competitors our playbook. Is there any company that would reveal its long term strategy?
@gloscherrybomb Some of your questions addressed above, so here’s what’s not been discussed yet.
While Zwift is developing our own hardware, we remain committed to working with our hardware partners to continue to improve the Zwift experience and to develop new and exciting new features for you to enjoy.
Community racing is a priority project that I’m personally involved with. ZwiftPower.com’s integration with Zwift HQ is very much a work in progress that has our daily attention. Please stay tuned on the ZwiftPower Community sub-board.
It’s no secret that we are developing Zwift Rowing. We do not have a confirmed product launch date, at this time, so… a little later than zooner.
What leads Zwift to believe hardware partners such as Wahoo will continue to work with Zwift? Inevitably Zwift will feel pressure to differentiate its hardware offering from competitors by integrating software features not available to others. Once there is no longer parity in the service offering, hardware partners will abandon Zwift.
Abandon Zwift for what/whom? Whilst I share your cynism that Zwift may hold back certain things as USPs, I don’t see that affecting the other companies too much. Might piss them off given how their devices have helped to build the platform, but I don’t believe it would cause any sort of exodus. That would be cutting off their noses to spite their faces.
This doesn’t make much sense to me. How does the game user interface depend on the number of users? Surely what would have worked for 20,000 concurrent users in March would work for 35,000 or 50,000 concurrent users.
If the unexpected spike in March/April caused people to realise the UI wasn’t fit for purpose, it would have been destined to be changed again in a few years at best anyway, surely.
But this is an example of what many of us complain about quite often. We’d prefer Zwift to be more communicative sooner about these things. You know we’re all waiting for the UI to drop. People have been asking where it is for months, after the early-lockdown peak declined again and the stated reasons became less relevant. Rather than silence for months before casually dropping something like this in a forum post, we’d* prefer you to be more open and say “Hey, we’ve realised the new UI isn’t going to work as intended – or whatever the problem is --, so we’re going to give it another pass.”
*obviously I don’t speak for everyone, but I can guarantee a lot of the community members agree with me
This is what crap communication looks like. G-d knows how long you’ve been sitting on this knowledge. Godspeed to you when the VC is waiting for results that you don’t deliver. I guarantee you stunts like this won’t fly so well with them like they do with your user base.
As long as Zwift customers continue to pay for what is really a beta product, venture capitalists wont give a damn. They don’t care about customer satisfaction they only care about the customer’s wallet.
Eric said earlier this year it was low priority and that they needed to be able to put controls in place so you don’t cheat them. Also, it made since when tied to a bike as they could control that. I wouldn’t expect it any time zoon.
“Announcing our roadmap sounds a lot like giving our competitors our playbook. Is there any company that would reveal its long term strategy?”
Uhm, yes? A lot of companies share a general roadmap to point towards a not-so-specific direction where they are heading. We have zero clue about where Zwift efforts ae heading. Develop the core product.That looks great in a PowerPoint presentation for the VC guys, but nothing else. The Zwift released to general population IS a core product, save for ZwiftPower which was purchased recently.
Most of the active forum users (but I’d like to believe that a good portion of Zwifters in general) would like to see a roadmap, which points in a direction at least. Be it Zwift Racing, integration with UCI / Olympic Commitee, Hardware development, core ENGINE development, etc.
The competitors of Zwift aren’t dumb, they at least suspect a more detalied approach than you’d share with a roadmap if they keep an eye on intellectual property purchases and meetings visited my Zwift employees (or the CEO himself), like VirtuPro license, UCI meetings, etc.
The insights shared about Zwift possibly “locking out” game enhancements for other hardware as they develop their own are interesting but is that possible? Many users have already invested > 1,000€ for the hardware they use now, how many of those established users would purchase the Zwift HW if that becomes the case considering their existing HW becomes virtually obsolete and have virtually no value to re-sell. If Zwift does force its HW onto users in that manner, another platform like RGT will see a surge of new users as we ditch Zwift for something that works with our existing HW.
I think Zwift has identified a pathway to gain more users by introducing their own branded HW, such users are more comfortable with a “whole system” approach.
Zwift is focused on growing its user base, I doubt they are going to knowingly alienate the base they have now.
As for the comments about using some of the new funding for enhancements that are old requests, I will share something I learned from one of the most brilliant business people I’ve known. You can’t please everyone, but if you please most, you’ve done your job. Let those who don’t like it leave, because once you fix the one thing, they will have another thing they are unhappy about.
There are many things in the game I don’t like; but the good outweighs the bad. I’m happy Zwift secured more funding since that means we may see some enhancements as they build more infrastructure.
@Shuji_Sakai thanks for sharing all that information I was pleasantly surprised with how well you answered those questions.
I do echo other concerns however that Zwift have moved from zooon to just untrustworthy in their communication. Everything is hear say and hidden in the depths of a forum thread. It would be really useful to have an announcement board of sorts a bit like the feature requests page where there is a ‘super common feature requests’ section that people go to first to remove duplication. You know what the passionate bunch are waiting for so just stick an honest status against each one in a place that’s accessible for all.
