Producers in film, television and games have had a difficult three years, and immersive studios are trying to build sturdier companies at the same time. Future-Proofing Producers, a report released in October by CIIIC, the Dutch organisation responsible for developing the national immersive experience (IX) sector, looks at what this requires. Liz Rosenthal, curator of Venice Immersive, wrote it with CIIIC’s Heleen Rouw after a closed session held during the festival in September. Around the table were producers and funders including Atlas V, Lucid Realities, Fever, the Netherlands Film Fund and FilmFernsehFonds Bayern. They described a sector whose work is now artistically and technically mature, but whose companies still lack the skills, financing and distribution networks needed to last.
Cover: Venice Immersive 2025 Exhibition
A crisis shared with neighbouring industries
The report concentrates on immersive, but its findings fit a wider pattern. The games industry lost 15,631 jobs to layoffs in 2024 and 9,197 in 2025, according to the ASGC tracker, which in July projected more than 14,000 for 2026. In Europe, the European Audiovisual Observatory found that commissions of TV fiction by global streamers fell 7% in 2024, a second consecutive decline. It also noted that only 3% of the 2,000 companies that produced a fiction title between 2015 and 2024 did so every year. In the UK, Indielab found that 56% of small independent producers had seen their net assets fall over three years.
Immersive studios share public funders and talent pools with these industries. The report proposes recruiting experienced producers from film, TV and games, which the current market may make easier. But those arrivals bring habits shaped by industries that are themselves in difficulty, and participants warned that producers coming from adjacent sectors often misjudge immersive projects and struggle to find the right expertise.
Producers trained for the prototype stage
The core diagnosis is that much of the work premiering at festivals comes from artists and creative technologists whose experience lies in service work, not in IP development, financing or long-term exploitation. Projects arrive at Venice at pilot stage, often without a distribution partner and without money for the next phase. One interviewee described “a structural producer gap that goes beyond skills.” The skills most often missing are financial structuring, co-production, dealmaking, contracts and team management.
Training offers few answers. Creative Europe’s MEDIA programme supports 39 training programmes for film and TV producers and none for immersive, while IX schemes mostly fund artistic process and prototypes. The participants suggest IX versions of EAVE, ACE or Eric Pommer, training adapted to career stage, and paid mentoring inside live productions, covering both the junior producer’s salary and the senior producer’s time.
Funding rules are criticised just as strongly. Producers say funders treat research, development and production as a single stage and expect development grants to deliver something close to a finished project, while audience research and market studies are usually ineligible. “There are so many elements of development that we’re not allowed to fund,” participants said. One warned that this leaves “no space for investing in the strategy and people that make the project viable.” Because money arrives project by project, teams are hard to keep together. The report calls for slate funding, which lets a company develop several projects while accepting that some will fail, and cites the former CreativeXR scheme in the UK, which combined first finance, mentoring and introductions to investors.
Building the missing distribution layer
Location-based entertainment remains the most promising market for immersive work, but getting into it is largely left to producers. One producer contacted 65 venues, got 30 replies and showed the piece in seven. “A film producer doesn’t go to every film theatre in the world to sell their film,” the producer pointed out. There are almost no distributors or sales agents for immersive work, so producers handle distribution themselves, with no funding for it. In one case described in the report, venues joined a project as development co-funders, which then helped the producer secure public production money. Such deals remain informal, and many cultural venues are under financial strain.
The recommendations aim at this intermediate layer: funding channelled through venues so they can commission and license work, touring networks sharing equipment and know-how, funds to help distributors emerge, and immersive strands inside established markets such as Cannes, Berlin and Venice. France 2030 is mentioned as a programme that gave venues real opportunities, although participants found its funding too slow to arrive.
The report also notes that immersive has no international producers’ network comparable to those in film, where alumni of EAVE or ACE share sales figures, licensing data and case studies. Participants want a funded community that could also inform the public funders who design support schemes. CIIIC presents the report as a first step towards EU programmes for training and talent mobility. In the current climate, those programmes will have to show that immersive can support companies over several projects, at a time when film and games producers are facing the same problem.
