For over a decade, Unity and Unreal have been the de‑facto platforms for game creation, accounting for roughly 70 % of the titles launched on Steam in 2025. While the open‑source Godot engine has enjoyed notable traction in recent years and some major studios cling to proprietary solutions—Capcom’s RE Engine being a prime example—the market has largely been a duopoly dominated by the two giants. Enter Immersive Technologies, better known as Immens, a fledgling startup founded by three seasoned veterans: Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient. Their résumés read like a who‑is‑who of the gaming world, with stints at Epic Games (the creators of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and even Apple.
The trio believes that despite the entrenched positions of Unity and Unreal, there remains ample room for a fresh engine that addresses the pain points that have begun to surface across the industry. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee highlighted a unique moment in time: “There’s an opportunity now to build a new engine that didn’t exist a couple of years ago.” He argues that advances in AI‑assisted programming have lowered the barrier to constructing a full‑featured development stack from the ground up. “With the help of AI‑supported programming, you can probably start making things from scratch again,” he explained.
“Under a lot of guidance and control, you can build something that can bring full functionality fast.” Valient, Immens’s chief technology officer, is quick to clarify that the company’s use of AI differs from the hype‑driven “prompt‑to‑asset” narrative that circulates on social media. “The AI in Immens is about building the engine in a way that is really extensible,” he said. “AI can reason about a lot of data and the code base really well.
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 to make this game. I really want my custom particle system.
Let me add it there.’ So that is one part of how we’re doing it with AI in mind. We want to enable people to use AI to extend it faster.” The motivation behind this AI‑centric engine is rooted in the current state of the games market, which Brussee describes as “rough.” Development costs continue to climb, and the financial risk for small studios is becoming unsustainable.
“It’s really hard to be successful making games,” he noted. “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, Immens’s chief product officer, points out that the engine landscape has entered a phase of “standardisation and consolidation.” While this has provided a solid foundation, it has also stifled innovation. “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 key criticisms De Jong levels at existing engines is their monolithic nature. Developers are forced to conform to proprietary file formats and rigid pipelines, which can be a major bottleneck for creativity.
With AI, Immens aims to flip that dynamic, delivering an engine that adapts to the developer rather than the other way around. “It needs to be very flexible,” he explained. “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 acknowledges that AI is a double‑edged sword. While it is “really powerful,” it can also “go off the rails really quickly if you don’t pay attention.” Immens therefore places control firmly in the hands of the user.
“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. You can also create bespoke tools.” He illustrated the impact with a concrete example: creating five characters with a specific trait used to require weeks of planning and manual labor; now, with AI‑augmented tooling, a developer could prototype that in a coffee break and reuse the workflow as needed, dramatically cutting cost and time.
Flexibility is baked into Immens’s architecture. De Jong stresses that the platform does not impose a single workflow: “It’s up to you how you want to use it. 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 pillar of the design.
By embracing open standards and text‑based file formats, Immens ensures that assets from tools like Blender, Maya, or any generative‑AI pipeline can be imported without friction. “The moment you have files that are text based, anything can read it,” Brussee said. “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… If you want to use something like Blender or Maya or generative stuff or our own stuff, you can just plug it in because it’s all talking to each other at a level where it can communicate, because it’s open standards. That’s big.” 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 generate a Grand Theft Auto‑scale experience from a single prompt. Immens’s founders temper such expectations, positioning AI as a powerful assistant rather than a magical creator.
“The big games and everything in between will be done because AI made everybody better,” Valient asserted. “It has negative connotations right now because it is disrupting everything at a scale that nobody has seen.” De Jong adds a note of responsibility: “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.” Economic anxieties also swirl around AI, with many warning of a speculative bubble. Valient draws a parallel to the dot‑com era, noting that while many companies will fall, the underlying technology endures.
“Is AI going away? No. With the dot‑com bubble, did the internet go away?
No. All the ‘I have a domain, give me money’ companies went away.
That’s probably what happens. 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 remains modest. Immens has secured its “first commitments” but has not disclosed a precise figure, describing the amount as “reasonable.” Brussee warns against over‑capitalisation: “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.” The team remains lean—just the three founders plus a handful of helpers—by design.
De Jong explains the trade‑off: “Making an engine is a very complex endeavour, so you can’t just throw a million people at it and expect it to work. You need a small set of people to gradually build it up and come to certain decisions and realisations.
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 targeting a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a full editing workflow powered by generative AI, slated for release later this month. Brussee notes the speed of progress: “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. So it’s really hard to make a reasonable statement about timelines.” Business‑model discussions are still early.
While Immens admires Epic’s “we succeed when you succeed” licensing philosophy, Brussee says it’s premature to make definitive statements. Ultimately, the founders hope their engine will enable 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,” 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."