For many years the game‑development world has been dominated by the twin pillars of Unity and Unreal, which together powered roughly 70% of all Steam releases slated for 2025. While the open‑source Godot engine has gained traction and a handful of studios cling to proprietary solutions such as Capcom’s RE Engine, the market has largely been a duopoly. Against this backdrop, three seasoned industry veterans—Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient—have founded Immens with the belief that there is still space for a fresh, more adaptable engine.
Their résumés read like a who’s‑who of game‑tech powerhouses, spanning Epic Games (the creators of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and even Apple. Together they aim to challenge the status quo.
In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee argued that the timing is ripe for a new engine that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. He pointed to the rapid advances in AI‑assisted programming as a catalyst that can let developers start from a clean slate again, while still retaining the guidance and control needed for production‑grade projects. “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 the flashy “prompt‑to‑asset” hype that dominates headlines. Instead, the AI is woven into the engine’s architecture to make it highly extensible. He explained, “The AI in Immens is about building the engine in a way that is really extensible.
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.’” This philosophy aims to let developers use AI as a productivity multiplier, speeding up the creation of bespoke tools and systems. The motivation behind this ambitious project is the increasingly hostile economics of game development.
Brussee described the current climate as “rough,” noting that production costs continue to climb, making it harder 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, Immens’s chief product officer, observed that the engine market has become overly standardized and consolidated.
While this has provided a solid foundation, he argues the industry now needs genuine innovation rather than incremental refinements. “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.” A key criticism De Jong has of existing engines is their monolithic nature.
Developers are forced to adapt to proprietary file formats and rigid pipelines. By contrast, Immens intends to let the engine adapt to the developer’s workflow, thanks to AI‑driven flexibility.
“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, 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 also warned that AI, while powerful, can quickly go off‑track if left unchecked.
Immens therefore emphasizes transparency and control: developers will always be able to see what the engine is doing, review its decision history, and ensure repeatable outcomes. This level of oversight, he says, enables rapid prototyping—such as generating five uniquely‑traited characters over a coffee break—that would previously have taken weeks. The architecture of Immens is deliberately agnostic.
It does not enforce a single workflow or dictate how much AI should be used. Instead, the framework is built to let users decide where AI fits into their pipeline, while still guaranteeing that the AI understands the context correctly.
Open standards are another cornerstone; by relying on text‑based, interoperable file formats, Immens can seamlessly plug into tools like Blender, Maya, or any generative‑art system. “The moment you have files that are text based, anything can read it,” Brussee noted.
“The AI can read files and do things with it… It’s about how we can embrace some of this stuff so we have smarter interfaces with everything.” The broader industry remains divided on AI’s role in game creation. Some pundits on LinkedIn predict a future where entire GTA‑scale experiences could be conjured with a single prompt. Immens’s team, however, views AI as a powerful assistant rather than a replacement for craftsmanship. “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.” Economic concerns also linger. Critics worry that AI‑focused startups are riding a speculative bubble. Valient counters that while bubbles burst, the underlying technology endures—just as the internet survived the dot‑com crash. “There’s a lot of anxiety, but let’s be honest: is AI going away?
No… 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.” Funding for Immens remains modest. The founders have secured “first commitments” but have not disclosed the exact amount, describing it as “reasonable.” Brussee cautioned against over‑capitalisation, noting that excess cash can breed complacency.
The company remains a lean operation—just the three founders and a handful of helpers—by design. De Jong explained the delicate balance: a game engine is complex and cannot be built by a million‑person army, yet timing is critical to capture the window of opportunity created by AI’s rise. Immens is currently targeting a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a generative‑AI‑driven editing workflow, slated for release later this month.
The team reports they are already moving twice as fast as their original timeline, which projected a year‑long development cycle. As for the business model, Brussee admires Epic’s “we succeed when you succeed” approach but admits it’s too early to lock down specifics. Ultimately, the founders hope Immens 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,” 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."