For years, Unity and Unreal have ruled the game‑development landscape, accounting for roughly 70% of all Steam releases in 2025. While Godot has enjoyed notable growth and some studios cling to proprietary solutions—Capcom’s RE Engine being a prime example—the market has largely been a duopoly.
Yet three seasoned industry veterans, Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient, see a gap they believe they can fill. Their new venture, Immens, aims to introduce a fresh engine built around artificial intelligence, promising lower costs and faster iteration for indie teams and smaller studios. The founders’ résumés read like a who’s‑who of modern game development.
Brussee helped shape the original Quake engine, De Jong was a lead programmer on the Horizon series, and Valient has held senior roles at Epic Games, Guerrilla, and Apple. Their combined experience gives them a unique perspective on why the current engine ecosystem feels stagnant.
In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee argued that the timing is ripe for a new platform that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. "AI‑assisted programming lets us start from scratch again," he explained. "With the right guidance, we can assemble a fully‑functional engine much more quickly than traditional hand‑coded pipelines." Valient, Immens’s chief technology officer, stressed that the AI component isn’t about generating assets with a single prompt. Instead, it’s woven into the engine’s architecture to make the codebase highly extensible.
"AI can reason over massive code repositories and data sets," he said. "If we design the engine with that capability in mind, even a solo developer can plug in a custom particle system or a bespoke physics module without rewriting large sections of the core." The motivation behind Immens stems from a grim reality that Brussee describes as "rough" for developers.
Game budgets keep inflating, and the risk of financial failure grows alongside. "We need new workflows that cut costs, shrink team sizes, and accelerate delivery," he warned. "Otherwise studios keep gambling their livelihoods on ever‑larger projects." De Jong, the chief product officer, observes that the engine market has become overly standardized and consolidated. While standardization provides a solid foundation, it also stifles innovation.
"The industry faces a host of challenges, and simply repeating the old playbook won’t solve them," he asserted. "What we need now is genuine innovation, not more of the same." One of De Jong’s criticisms of existing engines is their monolithic nature. Developers must conform to proprietary file formats and rigid pipelines, limiting creativity.
With AI, Immens intends to flip that dynamic, delivering an engine that adapts to the developer rather than the other way around. "Flexibility is key," he said.
"You should be able to swap modules, append new tools, or reshape the interface to match your personal workflow. If I need a shortcut that mirrors my past experience, I can build it directly into the engine." Valient acknowledges AI’s double‑edged sword.
While it is "really powerful," it can also veer off‑track if left unchecked. To mitigate this, Immens is built with transparency at its core. "When you use the engine, you always know what it’s doing and why," he explained.
"Every action is logged, repeatable, and can be audited, so you stay in control." This level of control enables rapid prototyping. Imagine needing five characters with a specific trait; traditionally, that could take weeks of manual work. With AI‑driven tooling, a developer could sketch the concept over coffee, generate the assets, and have a reusable pipeline ready in minutes.
The cost savings are dramatic, and the creative loop shortens dramatically. Immens also refuses to dictate a single workflow. De Jong says the framework is deliberately open‑ended: "You decide how much AI you want to employ and where. The architecture is modular so you can plug in or pull out AI components as needed." This approach dovetails with the company’s commitment to open standards.
By using text‑based, human‑readable file formats, Immens ensures that external tools—Blender, Maya, or any generative system—can communicate seamlessly. "When files are plain text, any program can parse them," Brussee noted.
"That openness is a huge advantage over closed, proprietary pipelines." The broader industry conversation about AI is polarized. Some pundits hype "click‑to‑game" engines that could conjure a Grand Theft Auto‑style world from a single sentence.
Immens’s team sees AI more modestly, as a powerful assistant rather than a replacement for human creativity. "AI makes everyone better, not a substitute for talent," Valient said. "It’s a tool, and like any tool, it can be misused, but it also has the potential to unlock unprecedented artistic expression." Economic concerns also swirl around AI, with many fearing a bubble of over‑valued startups. Valient draws a parallel to the dot‑com era: the internet didn’t disappear when the bubble burst; only the weakest companies fell.
"We’re focused on building a solid engine first. AI just accelerates our development and lets us dream bigger.
Whether it’s a bubble or not, we can’t predict that, but we can ensure our product stands on its own merits." Funding remains modest. Immens has secured its "first commitments" but has not disclosed exact figures, describing the amount as "reasonable." Brussee warns against excessive capital: "Too much money can make a startup lazy. Scrappiness breeds innovation." The team remains tiny—just the three founders plus a handful of helpers—by design.
De Jong explains that an engine’s complexity doesn’t scale linearly with headcount; a focused group can make decisive choices faster than a massive, bureaucratic crew. Balancing a lean team with enough resources to hit a narrow market window is the core strategic challenge they are navigating. Immens is currently racing toward a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a full editing workflow powered by generative AI.
The target is to release the demo within the month, a timeline that Brussee says is already twice as fast as originally projected. "We aimed for year‑end, and we’re ahead of schedule," he laughed.
Business‑model discussions are still in early stages. While Immens admires Epic’s revenue‑share approach—"we succeed when you succeed"—they haven’t committed to any specific arrangement yet. Ultimately, the founders hope Immens will spark a new wave of creativity and risk‑taking in games. "We love games and want to see more daring, artistic expressions," Brussee concluded.
"If our technology can help studios push boundaries and innovate, that would be amazing."