DigiFest 2025
Eastbourne, October 15th, 2025
What is DigiFest?
Eastbourne DigiFest is a one-day conference held in Eastbourne. It is designed to bring together businesses and professionals to discuss and explore the latest in digital innovation and technology. The 2025 event, held on Wednesday, October 15th, was an event for industry leaders to share knowledge, discuss trends, and start new collaborations.
Why did we do it?
This year we wanted to really show what we do, and why we do it. We gave our own presentation and spent the day networking with many exhibitors and attendees. This engagement led to many new partnership opportunities and helped us build better relationships with people in the industry.
The event was a great chance to showcase our development work and explain the unique games we create in more detail. Many attendees were impressed by the scale of our achievements, especially considering we started this work at the age of 16. We also spoke about how the TeamTBM Universe began as a college project, and its rapid growth shows our commitment and effective development strategy.
Summary of Talk and Presentation
The session, "A Gateway to the Metaverse," was presented by Tyler Mortimer-Wise and Ben McCormick, and hosted by Ellie Hale. Key discussion points covered included:
Platform Development & Challenges
- Team Introduction: Featuring Ellie Hale, Tyler Mortimer-Wise, and Ben McCormick (including professional links).
- Defining the Metaverse: Explained as any interactive 3D space, with examples like VR, multiplayer games, and the film Ready Player One.
- TeamTBM's Roblox Journey: Focused on our current game data and platform development issues.
- The Data Challenge: We highlighted our custom, complex data system that allows us to share user data across all our games, bypassing the limitation of Roblox's native DataStores.
Brand Integration and Market Analysis
- Brands in the Metaverse: Used the Adidas Virtual Store as a case study for virtual product trials and exclusive digital item sales.
- IKEA Example: Presented the "Co-Worker Game" to show unique, non-linear career experiences for brands in the platform.
- Platform Demographics: Analysis showed the largest user group is aged 13-24, highlighting a maturing and valuable audience.
- Market Size (Q2, 2025): Shared metrics like 27.4 Billion Engagement Hours and 111.8 Million Daily Active Users.
- AAA Games and Roblox: Discussed why large studios often miss the opportunity on Roblox (focus on high-end graphics over social functionality) despite the massive youth audience.
