Zwift had that one solved just fine for years: recognize the fight you can't win and never ever give the impression that the platform might be good for racing. Before they did a radical 180 on that topic, racing was the one feature users were suggesting over and over again that Zwift staunchly rejected.
Then the usual happened, ran out of VC money. Zwift are knee deep in the viscous cycle of raise money, hire lots of people with that money because you are obliged to spend the money you raised, fail to out-earn your newly inflated costs, try raising more money.
Of course they need a story to tell investors, a story why this time it will all be different, and one time, after "running!" and before "our own hardware!", it was "racing", abandoning all careful avoidance of the cheating problem in a 125M hail Mary: "we'll introduce racing! TV licences and sponsoring will make all our troubles faint memories". (at the time there were independent racing clubs doing events on the platform thatvtolerated them at best, which must have helped selling this story a lot)
Running is still a non-starter four years after introduction (fully unlocked on a free tier, and most of the very few runners you see I the platform are probably triathletes who just use the virtual cycling platform for the treadmill as well because they already have an account) and the hardware division was closed before the first product (current offerings are badge-engineered third party). Racing is certainly not quite as successful as hoped and suffering from exactly the same chatting problems that made them carefully avoid racing at first, but compared to those other "funding round stories", it's looking not quite as bad. They are still hopelessly overspending, but it seems that by the time of "racing will solve all our problem", they were at least aware of the viscous cycle problem and burnt off most of the excess money that didn't go to compensate ongoing losses as ad spending, instead of hiring even more.
Then the usual happened, ran out of VC money. Zwift are knee deep in the viscous cycle of raise money, hire lots of people with that money because you are obliged to spend the money you raised, fail to out-earn your newly inflated costs, try raising more money.
Of course they need a story to tell investors, a story why this time it will all be different, and one time, after "running!" and before "our own hardware!", it was "racing", abandoning all careful avoidance of the cheating problem in a 125M hail Mary: "we'll introduce racing! TV licences and sponsoring will make all our troubles faint memories". (at the time there were independent racing clubs doing events on the platform thatvtolerated them at best, which must have helped selling this story a lot)
Running is still a non-starter four years after introduction (fully unlocked on a free tier, and most of the very few runners you see I the platform are probably triathletes who just use the virtual cycling platform for the treadmill as well because they already have an account) and the hardware division was closed before the first product (current offerings are badge-engineered third party). Racing is certainly not quite as successful as hoped and suffering from exactly the same chatting problems that made them carefully avoid racing at first, but compared to those other "funding round stories", it's looking not quite as bad. They are still hopelessly overspending, but it seems that by the time of "racing will solve all our problem", they were at least aware of the viscous cycle problem and burnt off most of the excess money that didn't go to compensate ongoing losses as ad spending, instead of hiring even more.