The Immersive Experience Summit 24 was our biggest yet. Tickets sold out as 700 immersive experience creators, producers and operators from across the UK and Europe came together for a day of knowledge sharing and networking.
We had a huge range of people from across the immersive genres and in a huge variety of different roles. This breath of our community is vital for the cross pollination that we want to try and encourage through these events.
As always we’re trying to listen to the feedback from the event in order to work out what to do in 2025. We’re going to share some of that feedback in this article and explain what we’re looking into doing, so that we can keep you in the loop and get your thoughts on our plans.
Overall, the post-event feedback has been incredibly positive with the majority of people finding it valuable and wanting us to do it again next year. Our challenge now is to find a way to do this in a financially sustainable way that can become a regular feature in the calendar.
Summit 25 will be over two days
A key theme from the feedback was that people wanted more time to attend more sessions, and more time to network with other delegates and the exhibitors. As a result, for 2025 we’re looking at making the Summit a 2-day event, with the same amount of content overall – so half as much per day. We hope that this will allow people more freedom to attend the sessions they want to, and more time to network and meet other delegates.
We also hope that we will be able to record all the sessions again and make them available to ticket holders. This means we are going to assess how many people actually access the content from this year’s event before deciding to go ahead or not. We’re aware from previous events that the number of people who say they want to access recordings afterwards doesn’t always tally up with the number of people who actually do.
For the 2024 Summit recordings, in an effort to broaden the reach of the content we’re going to be publishing sessions on our podcast feed, as well as our Youtube channel, as an experiment to see if this is a more convenient way for people to access the sessions.
Ticketing & Financial Accessibility
Anyone who has tried to bootstrap-fund an event or festival knows how hard it can be, especially when it’s rapidly growing each year like this event. It’s also not helpful that there is a widely acknowledged cultural trend to leave it to the last minute to buy tickets. We sold 60% of our tickets in only the 3 weeks before the event which was a nightmare to deal with from a cashflow point of view, and very stressful trying to work out if we’d misjudged the demand completely.
Another key theme was financial accessibility. Of course, by extending the event to two days our costs are going to go up, which is going to make this more challenging for us to manage. We’ve always aimed to make accessibility a priority, which is why our pricing is already well below other comparable industry events, however in the absence of a large sponsor or source of funding to subsidise the event we know we’re not going to be able to meet everyone’s needs.
We’re also going to level with you, and say that we took a big £120K gamble with Summit 24 and it ended up costing us about a £20K loss. To be sustainable moving forward, we know we either need to raise more industry support, or take less of a risk on the low ticket pricing. We’re passionate about the importance of having a place for immersive creators on all scales to meet, and for the event to be the catalyst for the sector we want it to become, so the model needs some tinkering.
To address some of these challenges, Summit 25 will be changing to a phased ticketing model similar to that of Boomtown and other festivals. This means that we’ll be releasing tickets in 3 phases with the best prices available for people who commit early.
One of the perks of our new membership package will be priority access to these early stage tickets so sign up the mailing list for more information as it’s released.
Sponsors, Exhibitors and Partners
We’re looking at how we can expand the role of sponsors, exhibitors and partners at this year’s event. We had some really positive feedback from the companies involved in Summit 24 and are exploring various ideas and options for companies to get more involved, to help them create new contacts and opportunities in this growing sector. The number of companies interested will be key in our decision on which venue we book, so if you are interested in being involved in this year’s event please fill out the form and one of the team will get in contact with you.
Open Call for Summit 25 – Content Contributors & Interactive Experiences
We also know that you wanted more opportunities to get hands-on with demos, playtesting and seeing other people’s work. We want to explore this idea and so we’re putting out an open call to immersive creators to see what they could offer at the event and what the practical and cost implications would be.
The call for contributors for the content program is open as well. We want to announce presenters much earlier this year as part of our phased ticket model, so let us know if you are interested in contributing.
We will respond to your offers over the next couple of months as we start to put plans in place for the event.
Dates & Venue
Woolwich Works was an amazing venue but their availability for 2025 is limited, and depending on the outcome of this consultation we may try and find a different venue with more space for exhibitors and immersive work demos. We are currently looking at dates across late September & October, and hope to confirm in February where and when the event will be held.
