For years, Unity and Unreal have been the de‑facto platforms for video‑game creation, accounting for roughly 70 % of the titles that appeared on Steam in 2025. While open‑source alternatives like Godot have begun to gain traction, most large studios still cling to proprietary solutions—Capcom’s RE Engine being a prime example—and the market has seemed firmly locked into a duopoly.
Enter Immens, a fledgling studio founded by three industry veterans—Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient—who believe there is still room for a fresh engine and, more importantly, for a better way to build games. Their résumés read like a who's‑who of modern game development: experience at Epic Games (the creators of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and even Apple.
Together they aim to challenge the status quo. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee explained that the timing feels right for a new engine because “the tools that existed a couple of years ago simply don’t exist any more.” He sees AI‑assisted programming as the catalyst that can return developers to a state of true creation from scratch. “With a lot of guidance and control, you can build something that delivers full functionality quickly,” he said. Valient, Immens’s chief technology officer, is careful to distinguish their approach from the hype‑driven “prompt‑to‑asset” narrative that dominates many AI discussions.
For Immens, AI is a means of making the engine itself more extensible. “AI can reason over massive codebases and data sets,” he noted. “If we design the core with that in mind, even solo developers or tiny teams can plug in custom systems—say, a bespoke particle effect—without being confined to a limited scripting layer.” This extensibility, he argues, is the key to accelerating development while preserving creative freedom. The motivation behind the project is also economic.
Brussee described the current market climate as “rough,” noting that development costs keep climbing and the risk of failure is higher than ever. “We need new ways of working that lower budgets, shrink team sizes, and speed up timelines,” he said. The goal is to break the cycle where studios pour massive resources into a single title, jeopardizing their livelihood if the game underperforms.
De Jong, the chief product officer, echoed this sentiment, observing that the engine landscape has become overly standardized and consolidated. While that consolidation has provided a solid foundation, it has also stifled innovation.
“The industry is facing a host of challenges, and simply iterating on existing engines isn’t enough,” he argued. “We need innovation, not more of the same.” One of De Jong’s criticisms of current engines is their monolithic nature. Developers must adapt to proprietary file formats and rigid workflows, limiting how they can tailor tools to their own pipelines.
With AI, Immens aims to flip that script: the engine should adapt to the developer, not the other way around. “Flexibility is essential,” he explained. “You should be able to swap components, append new ones, and craft bespoke tools that match your exact workflow—down to the shortcuts, UI layout, and feature set you need for a particular project.” Valient acknowledges that AI is powerful but also volatile. “If you don’t keep an eye on it, the system can go off the rails quickly,” he warned.
Immens therefore emphasizes transparency and control: users will always see what the engine is doing, have access to its decision history, and be able to reproduce results reliably. This level of insight, he says, transforms previously weeks‑long tasks—like generating five characters with specific traits—into something that can be prototyped over a coffee break and then discarded after a handful of uses, dramatically cutting cost.
The architecture of Immens is deliberately agnostic. De Jong stresses that the framework does not enforce a single workflow or a prescribed amount of AI usage.
“It’s up to you how much AI you want to integrate and where,” he said. “Our job is to make sure the AI understands the context correctly.” Interoperability is another cornerstone. By embracing open, text‑based standards, Immens can speak fluently with tools such as Blender, Maya, or any generative‑AI pipeline. “When files are readable as plain text, any system can parse them,” Brussee noted.
“That opens the door for smarter interfaces across the entire development stack, something that proprietary engines have historically resisted.” The broader conversation around AI in game development is polarized. Some pundits on LinkedIn claim that future engines will let anyone conjure a Grand Theft Auto‑scale experience with a single prompt. Immens’s founders see such “click‑to‑game” fantasies as distant possibilities, but they firmly view AI as a tool that will make developers better, not replace them.
“AI is disruptive, and that creates negative connotations,” Valient said. “But it will ultimately elevate the craft, just as any powerful tool has done throughout history.” Economic anxieties also linger, with many questioning whether AI‑centric startups are part of a speculative bubble. Valient draws a parallel to the dot‑com era: “The internet didn’t disappear when the bubble burst; many companies fell, but the technology endured.
We’re building a solid engine first; AI simply accelerates our vision.” Funding remains modest. Immens has secured its “first commitments” but has not disclosed amounts, describing the target as “reasonable.” Brussee cautions against excess capital, noting that too much money can breed complacency. The team remains lean—just the three founders plus a handful of helpers—by design. “Building an engine is complex, but you don’t need a thousand engineers,” De Jong explained.
“A focused, small team can make critical decisions and iterate faster, especially when you have a limited window of opportunity as AI reshapes the industry.” The studio is currently developing a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a generative‑AI‑driven editing workflow. They aim to release this demo within the month, already having accelerated their timeline dramatically: “We expected to be done by year‑end, but we’re two‑times faster than anticipated,” Brussee reported. Regarding the business model, Brussee says they admire Epic’s “we succeed when you succeed” licensing philosophy but are not ready to commit to a specific approach yet.
Ultimately, the founders hope Immens will enable creators to push the medium forward, fostering more risk‑taking and artistic expression. “We love games and want to see more creativity and innovation built on this technology,” Brussee concluded. “That would be amazing."