For years, the game‑development landscape has been dominated by two heavyweight engines—Unity and Unreal. In 2025, they were responsible for roughly 70% of the titles released on Steam, while open‑source alternatives like Godot have been gaining traction and large studios continue to cling to proprietary solutions such as Capcom’s RE Engine.
The market, however, still feels tightly sealed around these incumbents. Enter Immens, a fledgling venture founded by three industry veterans—Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient.
Their résumés read like a who’s‑who of game‑tech history, spanning Epic Games (the creators of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and even Apple. Together they argue that despite the apparent monopoly, there is genuine space for a fresh engine that addresses the pain points that have accumulated over the past decade. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee highlighted a unique moment in time: "There’s an opportunity now to build a new engine that didn’t exist a couple of years ago. With AI‑supported programming, you can probably start making things from scratch again.
Under a lot of guidance and control, you can build something that can bring full functionality fast." This sentiment captures the core ambition of Immens—leveraging artificial intelligence not as a gimmick that spits out assets on demand, but as a structural aid that makes the engine itself more modular and extensible. Valient, Immens’s chief technology officer, clarifies the distinction: "The AI in Immens is about building the engine in a way that is really extensible.
The great thing is AI can reason about a lot of data and the code base really well. If we design the code base with this in mind, then even smaller teams or individuals can come and extend the engine. They are not just limited to a bit of scripting that they can do. They can come in and say, ‘I want to make this game.
I really want my custom particle system. Let me add it there.’ So that is one part of how we’re doing it with AI in mind. We want to enable people to use AI to extend it faster." The motivation behind this AI‑centric approach is the increasingly hostile economics of game production. Brussee describes the current climate as "rough": development costs are soaring, budgets are ballooning, and the risk of financial ruin for small studios is higher than ever.
"It’s really hard to be successful making games," he says. "They’re getting ever more expensive. You need to do something to break out of that cycle. Can we find new ways of working?
Can we find more efficient ways of working, to help decrease the cost and make games with fewer people in a faster time with smaller budgets so you’re not risking your livelihood, your studio, everything?" De Jong, Immens’s chief product officer, adds that the engine market has entered a phase of "standardisation and consolidation." While this has provided a stable foundation, it has also led to a monolithic mindset where developers must bend their pipelines to the engine’s rigid architecture and proprietary file formats. He argues that the next wave of innovation must break that rigidity: "Now we’re at the point where the industry is facing a number of different challenges, and just continuing to do things as we’ve done before is not really it. We need innovation, not standardisation. That’s what we’re pushing for.
There must be a different way." A key promise of Immens is flexibility. De Jong envisions an engine that behaves like a set of interchangeable Lego bricks rather than a solid block.
Developers could append, modify, or replace components to suit their specific workflow. "You can create tools that are exactly what I, as a person with my background, need, with the exact shortcuts, the exact features, the exact interface, the exact everything for what my team needs, for what my project needs," he explains. This level of customisation, powered by AI that can understand and manipulate code, aims to give small teams the same creative latitude that large studios enjoy.
Valient is quick to acknowledge AI’s limits. While he calls it "really powerful," he warns that without careful oversight the technology can "go off the rails really quickly." Immens therefore embeds transparency and control into its workflow: users can see the history of AI‑generated changes, verify repeatability, and roll back if necessary. "We are building Immens so that when you are using the engine, you are in control of what it is doing.
You know what it’s doing. You know the history of how it’s doing it, so that you know it is repeatable," he says.
This control translates into practical productivity gains. Imagine needing five characters with a particular trait. In a traditional pipeline, that could require weeks of manual work.
With Immens’s AI‑augmented tools, a developer could prototype the characters over a coffee break, reuse the generated assets across the project, and discard the temporary tooling once the job is done—dramatically cutting cost and time. Immens also embraces open standards to avoid the isolation that often plagues proprietary engines.
By favouring text‑based file formats, the engine can interoperate seamlessly with popular tools such as Blender, Maya, or any generative‑AI pipeline. "The AI can read files and do things with it.
There are actually really interesting open standards being built. More and more companies are building that into their tools, so that they become much easier to interoperate," Brussee notes. This openness is intended to create a cohesive ecosystem where assets flow freely between applications, reducing friction for developers.
The broader AI debate in games is not ignored. Some critics warn of a future where a single prompt could conjure a Grand Theft Auto‑scale experience, sparking fears of "click‑to‑game" solutions that could devalue craftsmanship. Immens’s founders acknowledge the hype but stress that AI should be viewed as a tool, not a replacement for human creativity.
Valient says, "The big games and everything in between will be done because AI made everybody better. It has negative connotations right now because it is disrupting everything at a scale that nobody has seen." Economic anxieties also linger, especially regarding the possibility of an AI bubble. Valient draws a parallel with the dot‑com era: while many startups vanished, the underlying internet technology endured and flourished.
"Is it a bubble? Nobody knows. Apparently, you don’t know we are in a bubble until it bursts," he admits.
Nonetheless, Immens remains focused on building a solid product first, using AI to accelerate development rather than to chase speculative valuations. Funding remains modest. The company has secured its "first commitments" but has not disclosed exact figures, describing the target as "reasonable." Brussee warns against over‑funding, noting that excess capital can breed complacency: "There’s always a danger with being a startup that you can have too much money. You also get lazy, when you need to be scrappy." Team size reflects this philosophy.
Apart from the three founders, Immens operates with a handful of helpers, deliberately staying lean to retain agility. De Jong explains the trade‑off: a massive team does not guarantee faster engine development; instead, a focused group can make critical decisions and iterate more quickly, especially during the narrow window of opportunity presented by AI’s rise.
The next milestone for Immens is a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases "the flow of editing something" using generative AI. Originally slated for year‑end, the team believes they will deliver the demo within the current month, effectively doubling their projected speed.
"When we started in April, we thought that would probably take us until the end of the year. So we’re already two times faster than we anticipated," Brussee says. Business‑model discussions are still in early stages. While Immens admires Epic Games’ revenue‑share approach—"we succeed when you succeed"—they consider it premature to commit to any particular scheme.
Ultimately, the founders hope their engine will enable a new wave of daring, artistic games. "We all love games.
We love complex expressions of the art form and want to see more of that," Brussee concludes. "We want to see more creativity and more risk‑taking. Hopefully we can see innovation in games that will be built on this kind of tech. That would be amazing."