I did a few workouts in zwift when the feature first came out, but not since then. I would often run a TR workout on my phone while riding in the zwift world on my big screen, but only if it was a hard workout where watching netflix, etc. wasn’t an option. If there was a way to “run” the TR workout from inside zwift (without manually creating the workout), I might use that feature, but it’s not something particularly important to me.
But I’m a fan of zwift and have been on it since beta. It’s my replacement for outside rides and racing when I can’t get that outside. Group rides and races are the main draw for me. I’m dealing with an injury right now and can’t ride outside, zwift has allowed me to maintain some fitness. Some of the group rides are very engaging and can be a much better workout vs, what I can achieve outside. The BMTR ride on saturday mornings is the best example, it’s about 4 hours of steady tempo work with no break. No way I can do that much quality work outside in only 4 hours and there is no way I can do that watching movies inside on the trainer without the motivation of a large pack and not wanting to get dropped.
I’ve been thinking this a lot lately. I just set up IndieVelo to do a structured workout (which I had in .ZWO format), and when my son saw it, he said “Zwifting again?”. He literally couldn’t tell the difference between IndieVelo and Zwift. IndieVelo also did some “little things” like showed my HRM’s battery level when I connected it. Why does Zwift still not do that? They are certainly good enough at cramming Zwift ads down my throat all the darn time!
I don’t think Zwift has as much of a moat as they might imagine. IndieVelo was trivially easy to download and setup, and it… works. I’m not sure how much they will end up charging if/when they come out of their current “closed beta”, but for how I do my indoor riding, they are already on par with Zwift.
But for most people, the lure of Zwift is knowing there are literally thousands of others to ride with (or just near, as the case may be). It is the social and interaction that keeps people on Zwift, not the game itself.
You can have superior graphics, more realistic road feel, battery life indicators, etc but if no one is there to ride with, they simply won’t reach any kind of critical mass to challenge Zwift.
The central issue for any Zwift competitor is how to lure riders over to another platform in significant numbers.
Yeah, just having the best technology rarely results in a successful business. Speed to market often wins over superior products in spaces where a subscription base and eco-system are big differentiators. That’s why you often see these companies operating deep in the red during their formative years buying defensible market share (typically spending much more on sales and marketing compared to R&D).
Zwift caters to a few different markets. I did qualify my statement with “…for how I do my indoor riding…”, because I really don’t care if anyone else is ever “there” with me or not. I only do structured workouts, and I don’t even really look at the screen much. I realize I’m not the typical audience, but the local folks I know who ride indoors are already about 50% on platforms other than Zwift.
Honestly, I want ALL the indoor riding/training apps to have viable business models, and compete with each other to make the best products. But what I’m seeing in the market now is more like gang-on-gang violence in the inner cities: It isn’t helping anyone. I’m afraid that, in the end, we’ll have a huge field of losers and one or two companies who aren’t being smart because they don’t have to be smart :-.
I haven’t tried Indie Velo because I use my iPad and I saw a video where Tariq said it only works on Windows and Mac, no mobile devices.
Having said that, one of the interesting things Tariq said was that the Indie Velo guy specifically said he knew he couldn’t beat the existing players so instead he wanted to quickly turn out cool features that people have been asking for that haven’t materialized in other apps (like verification, more realistic dynamics, average pace, etc.). Once he proved those things could be done, he hoped the other players would want to partner with him. Tariq specifically mentioned TR.
In contrast, I have a few professional connections with a Triple-A console and PC game developer who makes several blockbuster games (each title making 100’s of millions), all with massive worlds, highly complex physics and ultra-realistic in-game graphics. Their total headcount is around 350 people.
While Zwift likes to claim it was ‘born of gaming’, their headcount was always perplexing to me from a game development standpoint.
Especially when you compare the quality of their output (e.g. gameplay experience, frequency of game expansion, number of innovations, in-game feature monetization) with serious gaming companies that run with far fewer people.
Part of this is likely down to Zwift trying to do too many things simultaneously. Perhaps it was fueled by a fantasy by investors and some early founders that it would be a valley-style ‘unicorn’.
I use and like Zwift. And I still see great potential, so I have patience. (The patience of someone who remembers spending 3+ hour training sessions on rollers all winter before any of this existed).
I recall that Zwift was based on a program that Jon Mayfield had created to make training more engaging. Perhaps that could be called gamification.
Zwift has 100% been taking the path of every other social platform. Gain users, no matter the cost, get big enough to make competing impossible. What IndieVelo needs is to lure one or more big event promoters from Zwift over. Interestingly, FRR recently had a poll about what participants would think about holding the event on a different platform.
Cool, I’ll look for you next week. I probably have a at least a couple more weeks nursing an injured hand until outside rides are even a possibility. Today was interesting, I had a slow leak in my tire and it was lasting about 30 minutes at a time. That coffee break feature saved my day, felt like I was rolling into the wheel pit every 30 minutes.
I just tried Indie Velo on my MacBook Pro. It’s VERY beta. While setting things up the screen glitched a couple times and I had to hard kill it. Then, when I was finished, I tried to quit and it just went to a black screen that wouldn’t close but left my laptop running hard. Another hard kill. I’d be worried about that happening during my workout and losing the data.
I don’t rinserstand why some people get so bent out of shape about the coffee break….sure, some people use it to get through tough sections w/o getting dropped, but so what?
It is a group ride, not a race…and it is virtual! Do whatever you need to do.
After stepping up to the B’s this week vs the C’s on the BMTR ride, it was also interesting that none of the B’s seemed to care…but jeez, some C’s just get bent out of shape.
I think my training difficulty is like 10% lol. To be fair is basically do 2 types of rides on zwift, workouts in resistance mode and longer endurance or recovery free rides where I don’t want to have to think about shifting for every little roller.
Definitely true. I’m surprised IndieVelo doesn’t just add a ton of bots riding around. Doesn’t need to be 1000s. RGT used to do that but it wasn’t a crazy amount
. Yeah no idea why anyone would care at all lol.