For many years, the game‑development landscape has been dominated by two heavyweight engines: Unity and Unreal. In fact, by 2025 roughly seventy percent of all titles launched on Steam were built with one of those platforms. While open‑source alternatives like Godot have begun to gain traction, most large studios still lean on proprietary solutions—Capcom’s in‑house RE Engine being a prime example. This concentration has left the market feeling almost closed off, with the two giants holding the reins.
Enter Immers, a fledgling venture founded by three seasoned industry veterans—Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient. Their résumés read like a who’s‑who of game‑tech history, featuring stints at Epic Games (the creators of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and even Apple.
Together they argue that despite the entrenched dominance of Unity and Unreal, there remains ample room for a fresh engine that addresses the shortcomings of today’s tools. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee highlighted a timely opening: “There’s an opportunity now to build a new engine that didn’t exist a couple of years ago.” He believes that advances in AI‑assisted programming can finally let developers start from a clean slate rather than being forced to retrofit legacy pipelines. “With the help of AI‑supported programming, you can probably start making things from scratch again,” he said.
“Under a lot of guidance and control, you can build something that can bring full functionality fast.” Valient, Immers’s chief technology officer, clarifies that the AI they employ is not the typical “prompt‑to‑content” gimmick that dominates headlines. Instead, the AI is woven into the engine’s architecture to make the codebase highly extensible.
“The AI in Immers is about building the engine in a way that is really extensible,” he explained. “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 a custom particle system—let me add it there.’” This philosophy aims to empower developers to harness AI as a rapid‑prototyping assistant, accelerating the creation of bespoke features without sacrificing control. The motivation behind this AI‑centric engine stems from the current economic realities of game development.
Brussee describes the market as “rough,” noting that production costs continue to climb, making it increasingly difficult for small studios to survive. “It’s really hard to be successful making games,” he said.
“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, Immers’s chief product officer, points out that the engine space has become overly standardized and consolidated. While this has provided a solid foundation, he argues that the industry now needs genuine innovation, not merely more of the same. “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,” he said.
“Now we need innovation, not standardisation. That’s what we’re pushing for.
There must be a different way.” One of the pain points De Jong identifies in existing engines is their monolithic nature. Developers often have to conform to rigid workflows, proprietary file formats, and fixed toolsets. With AI, Immers envisions an engine that bends to the user’s needs rather than the other way around. “It needs to be very flexible,” he noted.
“You can interchange things. You can append things. You can modify things.
You can create your own tools for what you need.” He gives a personal example: “For me, I 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.” Valient acknowledges that AI, while powerful, can be unpredictable if left unchecked. “It’s really powerful, but it can also go off the rails really quickly if you don’t pay attention,” he warned.
To mitigate this, Immers is building transparency into the engine: users will always see what the AI is doing, its decision history, and will be able to reproduce results reliably. This level of oversight is crucial for creative pipelines where reproducibility and version control are non‑negotiable.
The team also stresses that Immers will not force a single workflow on its users. “It’s up to you how you want to use it,” De Jong said. “We want to make sure that the framework and architecture is set up so that you can decide how you want to work, including how much AI you want to use and where you want to use AI.” This modular approach aims to cater to a spectrum of developers—from solo creators who need rapid prototyping to mid‑size studios that require deep customization. Interoperability is another cornerstone of Immers’s design philosophy.
By embracing open standards and text‑based file formats, the engine can seamlessly communicate with popular tools such as Blender, Maya, or any generative‑AI pipeline. “The moment you have files that are text based, anything can read it,” Brussee explained.
“The AI can read files and do things with it. More and more companies are building that into their tools, so that they become much easier to interoperate.” This openness contrasts sharply with many current engines that act as closed ecosystems, often requiring cumbersome conversion steps. There is a vocal backlash against AI in game development, fueled in part by sensational claims that a single prompt could generate a Grand Theft Auto‑scale experience. Immers acknowledges the hype but positions AI as a tool rather than a magic wand.
“The big games and everything in between will be done because AI made everybody better,” Valient said. “It has negative connotations right now because it is disrupting everything at a scale that nobody has seen.” Both Valient and De Jong stress responsible use: AI should augment human creativity, not replace it.
Economic anxieties also swirl around the AI boom, with many fearing a bubble of over‑valued startups. Valient draws a parallel to the dot‑com era, noting that while many companies vanished, the underlying technology— the internet— persisted and flourished. “Is it a bubble? Nobody knows.
Apparently, you don’t know we are in a bubble until it bursts,” he mused. Immers’s strategy is to focus on building a genuinely useful engine first, letting AI accelerate development rather than being the sole selling point. Funding details remain vague. Immers has secured “first commitments” but has not disclosed amounts, describing the target as “reasonable.” Brussee cautions against excessive capital, noting that too much money 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,” he laughed.
The company remains tiny—just the three founders plus a handful of helpers—by design. De Jong explains that building an engine is a complex undertaking that doesn’t benefit from a massive headcount.
“You need a small set of people to gradually build it up and come to certain decisions and realisations. That takes time,” he said. At the same time, they are mindful of a limited window of opportunity created by the industry’s current flux and the rise of AI. Immers is currently racing toward a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a generative‑AI‑driven editing workflow.
The team aimed to have it ready by the end of the year but, according to Brussee, they are already moving twice as fast as anticipated. “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 we would go,” he noted.
Business‑model discussions are still in their infancy. While Immers admires Epic Games’ “we succeed when you succeed” licensing philosophy, they admit it’s too early to commit to a specific approach. Ultimately, the founders hope their engine will empower creators to push the medium forward, fostering risk‑taking and artistic expression.
“We all love games. We love complex expressions of the art form and want to see more of that,” Brussee concluded. “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.”