Wahoo Shuts Down RGT Virtual Cycling: Explained

Wahoo Fitness has announced to members that in less than 30 days – on October 31, 2023, the company will shut down the virtually cycling app RGT in an effort to focus “exclusively [on their] structured training content”.

Wahoo had acquired RGT (previously called Road Grand Tours) just over a year ago in April 2022 – ostensibly saving the platform at the time, when it was looking for buyers. Albeit, while the announcement was officially made in April 2022, the company said a the time that things had been in the works for a while – as proven by announcement-day integration of certain features. One does have to keep in mind that the size of the RGT team at the time was essentially numbered in the single digits, compared to larger platforms with many hundreds of employees.

Shortly after the acquisition, Wahoo did make a number of enhancements to the platform, such as voice chat last fall (which Zwift lacks), and then even bringing out dedicated steering for it with a new piece of hardware that you use your phone to steer with – the Wahoo KICKR STEER. The RGT platform did become favored by a smaller group of race-focused riders, mainly for some of the race tactics aspect of the platform.

However, when it came to volume of riders on the platform – that always lagged considerably behind Zwift. While certain scheduled race series did attract a good crowd, that didn’t really make-up for the sheer quantity of races/events/group rides offered by Zwift at literally all hours of the day. And that sets aside the number of actual users. For comparison, while pulling up the list of routes at this very moment, RGT totals a mere 35 riders in total. Whereas Zwift currently shows 3,902 riders. Certainly, it’s a Monday morning at 11AM CET – but that’s besides the point. People ride whenever they have time, and these numbers scaled about the same at different times of day, with RGT really only spiking during pre-scheduled races.

In other words, the writing has been on the wall for quite some time – as none of these user counts are that different to any other time period/day over the last 6-8 months.