For years, Unity and Unreal have ruled the game‑development landscape, accounting for roughly 70% of all titles launched on Steam in 2025. While the open‑source Godot engine has gained traction recently, most major publishers still cling to proprietary solutions—Capcom’s RE Engine being a prime example—leaving Unity and Unreal with a near‑monopoly on the market.
Enter Immers, a nascent studio founded by three seasoned veterans: Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient. Their résumés read like a who's‑who of the industry, spanning Epic Games (the creators of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and Apple.
Together they argue that even a market dominated by a few giants can still accommodate a fresh, better‑designed engine. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee noted that the timing feels right for a new platform that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. “With AI‑assisted programming, we can start building from the ground up again,” he explained. “With the right guidance and control, you can assemble a fully functional engine quickly.” Valient, Immers’ chief technology officer, clarified that the AI they employ isn’t the flashy, prompt‑to‑image kind that dominates headlines.
Instead, the AI is woven into the engine’s architecture to make it highly extensible. “AI can reason over massive codebases and data sets,” he said.
“If we design the core with that in mind, even a solo developer can plug in a custom particle system or a bespoke gameplay mechanic without being limited to a few scripting tricks.” This approach aims to let creators extend the engine faster, leveraging AI as a productivity partner rather than a magic wand. The motivation behind Immers’ AI‑powered engine stems from the grim reality of today’s game‑development economics. Brussee described the current climate as “rough,” emphasizing that production budgets keep inflating while the risk of failure grows.
“We need new ways of working that shrink costs, let smaller teams ship faster, and reduce the financial gamble that threatens studios and livelihoods,” he argued. De Jong, the company’s chief product officer, observed that the engine market has become overly standardized and consolidated. While this has provided a solid foundation, he believes the industry now requires genuine innovation.
“Continuing to do exactly what we’ve always done won’t cut it,” he said. “We need a different paradigm, not just more of the same.” One pain point he highlighted is the monolithic nature of existing engines. Developers are forced to adapt to proprietary file formats and rigid pipelines.
With AI, Immers envisions an engine that molds itself to the developer’s workflow. “Flexibility is key,” De Jong explained.
“You should be able to swap components, append new features, and craft tools that match your personal shortcuts, UI preferences, and project‑specific needs.” Valient also warned that AI, while powerful, can quickly go off‑track if left unchecked. To mitigate this, Immers is building transparency into the system: users will always see what the engine is doing, its decision history, and can reproduce results reliably. This level of control, he says, turns AI from a black box into an accountable assistant.
The team illustrated the impact with a simple example: creating five characters with a unique trait used to require weeks of planning and manual work. With AI‑driven tooling, a designer could sketch the idea over coffee, generate the assets, and iterate in minutes, discarding the temporary tools once the job is done. Such rapid, disposable workflows could dramatically lower development costs. Immers’ architecture deliberately avoids imposing a single workflow.
De Jong stressed that the framework is open‑ended: developers decide how much AI to incorporate and where. “We provide the scaffolding; you choose the construction method,” he said. Interoperability is another cornerstone.
By adopting open, text‑based standards, Immers ensures that any tool—Blender, Maya, or a custom pipeline—can read and write data without friction. “When files are human‑readable, the AI can parse and manipulate them directly,” Brussee noted. “This openness bridges the gap that many proprietary engines create, allowing smoother integration across the entire production stack.” The conversation around AI in games is polarized. Some commentators on LinkedIn hype “click‑to‑game” engines that could spawn Grand Theft Auto‑scale experiences from a single prompt.
Immers acknowledges that such a vision may one day be feasible, but for now they view AI strictly as a tool that augments human creativity. “AI makes everyone better, not a replacement for talent,” Valient affirmed. “It’s disruptive, which is why it has a negative stigma, but that disruption is necessary.” Economic concerns also loom. Critics warn that the AI boom resembles a bubble with inflated valuations.
Valient counters that, like the dot‑com era, the underlying technology will persist even if some companies fail. “AI isn’t disappearing; the internet didn’t vanish after the bubble burst,” he said. “Our focus is on building a solid engine; the AI component simply accelerates our development and expands our imagination.” Funding remains modest.
Immers has secured its “first commitments” but has not disclosed amounts, describing the target as “reasonable.” Brussee cautioned against over‑funding, noting that excess capital can breed complacency. “Startups need to stay scrappy,” he laughed. The company remains lean: the three founders plus a handful of helpers. This intentional small size allows rapid decision‑making and avoids the pitfalls of a massive, unwieldy team.
De Jong explained the trade‑off: “You can’t throw a million engineers at an engine and expect it to work. You need a tight group to iterate, make hard choices, and hit the market window that AI is opening.” Immers is currently racing toward a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a full editing workflow powered by generative AI, slated for release later this month.
The timeline has already outpaced their original estimate—what they thought would take until year‑end is now arriving in half that time. Regarding the business model, Brussee admires Epic’s “we succeed when you succeed” philosophy but admits it’s too early to commit to a specific revenue structure. The ultimate goal, he says, is to empower developers to create games that push artistic and technical boundaries.
“Games are our passion,” Brussee concluded. “We want to see more daring, more creative work. If our engine can help studios take risks and innovate, that would be amazing.”