For many years, the game‑development landscape has been dominated by two heavyweight engines: Unity and Unreal. In fact, by 2025 those two platforms powered roughly 70 % of all titles released on Steam.
While open‑source alternatives like Godot have begun to gain traction, the market still leans heavily toward proprietary solutions—Capcom’s in‑house RE Engine being a prominent example. In short, Unity and Unreal have long held a near‑monopoly on the engine space. Enter Immens, a startup founded by three industry veterans—Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient—who believe there is still room for a fresh, more adaptable engine. Their résumés read like a who’s‑who of game‑tech history: experience at Epic Games (the creators of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and even Apple.
Together they see an opportunity to challenge the status quo and offer developers a tool that is both powerful and flexible. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee explained that the timing feels right for a new engine because "the landscape has changed in ways that didn’t exist a couple of years ago." He pointed to the rise of AI‑assisted programming as a catalyst that could let developers start building from scratch again, while still retaining tight guidance and control over the final product. "With 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, Immens’s chief technology officer, clarified that the company’s use of AI is not about generating assets from a simple text prompt.
Instead, the AI is woven into the engine’s architecture to make it highly extensible. "The AI in Immens is about building the engine in a way that is really extensible," he noted. "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: ‘Oh, I want to make this game. I really want my custom particle system.
Let me add it there.’" The motivation behind this ambitious project is the increasingly harsh economic reality of game development. Brussee described the current climate as "rough," emphasizing that production costs are spiraling upward, making it harder for studios to stay afloat. "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, the chief product officer, added that the engine market has become overly standardized and consolidated. While this has provided a stable foundation, he argues that the industry now needs genuine innovation rather than incremental improvements.
"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 explained. "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 highlighted is the monolithic nature of existing engines.
Developers often have to conform to proprietary file formats and rigid workflows, which can stifle creativity. With AI, Immens aims to flip that script, delivering an engine that adapts to the developer rather than forcing developers to adapt to it. "It needs to be very flexible," he said.
"You can interchange things. You can append things. You can modify things.
You can create your own tools for what you need. For 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 is also candid about AI’s limitations. While he lauds its power, he warns that without careful oversight the technology can quickly go off‑track.
"We are building Immens so that when you are using the engine, you are in control of what it is doing," he said. "You know what it’s doing.
You know the history of how it’s doing it, so that you know it is repeatable." This transparency extends to the creative workflow. Valient illustrated how a task that once required weeks—such as generating five characters with specific traits—could now be prototyped over a coffee break using AI‑driven tools.
The resulting assets could be used repeatedly and then discarded, dramatically cutting costs. "That tool could be used like five times and then thrown away. This used to be super expensive. You really can make workflows that work exactly for what you want to do.
That’s really powerful," he emphasized. Immens’s philosophy is to avoid imposing a single workflow on its users. De Jong stressed that the framework and architecture are deliberately open‑ended, allowing developers to decide how much AI to incorporate and where.
"It’s up to you how you want to use it," he 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. But we do need to make sure that the AI understands things correctly." Interoperability is another cornerstone of Immens’s design.
By embracing open standards and text‑based file formats, the engine can seamlessly communicate with other 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. 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." The broader conversation around AI in game development is often polarized. Some commentators on LinkedIn hype the idea of "click‑to‑game" engines that could produce Grand Theft Auto‑scale experiences from a single prompt. Immens acknowledges that such a future might be possible, but they view AI primarily as a facilitator, not a replacement for human creativity.
"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." De Jong echoed this sentiment, framing AI as a tool that must be wielded responsibly. "As an industry, we can use AI in a responsible and productive way, and we have the responsibility to try and figure it out. It’s a tool.
Any tool humanity has ever made could be used in a negative way too. It’s our responsibility not to." Beyond creative concerns, there is unease about the economics of AI startups, with many fearing a bubble of over‑valued companies.
Valient downplays the risk, comparing it to the dot‑com era: the internet didn’t disappear, even though many early companies failed. "There are a lot of companies that will probably not survive.
There’s a lot of great technology and a lot of great products that will because they are simply good. That’s what we are trying to do.
We are first and foremost making a good engine. AI is making us faster and dreaming bigger, and designing it in a way that is faster for the future. Is it a bubble? Nobody knows.
Apparently, you don’t know we are in a bubble until it bursts." Funding-wise, Immens has secured its first commitments but has not disclosed exact figures, describing the amount as "reasonable." Brussee warned 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," he laughed.
"You also get lazy, when you need to be scrappy." The team remains intentionally small—just the three founders plus a handful of helpers—so they can stay agile and make deliberate design choices. De Jong explained the balancing act: a game engine is complex, but throwing a large team at it doesn’t guarantee success. "You need a small set of people to gradually build it up and come to certain decisions and realizations.
That takes time. On the other hand, there is a window of opportunity here over the next few years because of all the changes happening with the industry, with AI coming up. How do you make sure you hit that window of opportunity and you have enough funding and enough of a team there to do that, while at the same time not just dumping all the people on and expecting it to work?
That's the trade‑off we're in and we're working through." Immens is currently racing toward a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a generative‑AI‑driven editing flow. The team aims to release this demo within the month, already moving twice as fast as their original timeline projected when they started in April. "When we started in April, we thought that would probably take us until the end of the year," Brussee said.
"So we’re already two times faster than we anticipated. It’s really hard to make a reasonable statement about timelines." The business model remains under development.
While Immens admires Epic’s philosophy of succeeding when its users succeed, they consider it premature to make definitive statements about pricing or revenue sharing. Ultimately, Brussee hopes the engine will empower creators to push the medium forward. "We all love games. We love complex expressions of the art form and want to see more of that," he 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."