Unity and Unreal have long held sway over the game‑development landscape, accounting for roughly 70% of Steam releases in 2025. While Godot has made noticeable strides recently and some studios cling to proprietary tools—Capcom’s RE Engine being a prime example—the market remains largely dominated by the two giants. Yet three seasoned veterans, Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient, have founded Immens with a belief that there is still room for a fresh engine and for meaningful improvement. Their résumés read like a roll call of industry heavyweights, featuring stints at Epic Games (the creators of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and even Apple.
Together they aim to challenge the status quo. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee argued that the timing is now right for a new engine, one that simply didn’t exist a few years ago. He pointed to AI‑assisted programming as a catalyst that can let developers start from a clean slate again.
"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, Immens’ chief technology officer, clarified that the AI they are leveraging is not the kind that merely generates content from prompts. Instead, it is embedded in the engine’s architecture to make the codebase highly extensible. "The AI in Immens 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: 'Oh, 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‑powered engine stems from a grim view of the current market.
Brussee described the environment as "rough," noting that developing games is becoming increasingly expensive and risky. "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, observed that the engine space has undergone "standardisation and consolidation," which has provided a solid foundation but 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 De Jong’s criticisms of existing engines is their "monolithic approach." Developers must conform to proprietary file formats and workflows, limiting flexibility.
With AI, Immens aims to flip that model, offering an engine that adapts to the developer’s needs. "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, needs, with the exact shortcuts, the exact features, the exact interface, the exact everything for what my team needs, for what my project needs." Valient acknowledged AI’s power but warned it can go "off the rails" if unchecked. Immens therefore emphasizes transparency and control: users will always know what the engine is doing, see its decision history, and be able to reproduce results. This traceability enables rapid prototyping—like generating five distinct characters with specific traits in the time it used to take weeks—while still allowing developers to discard temporary tools after use.
Flexibility is baked into Immens’ architecture. De Jong stressed that the engine does not enforce a particular workflow; developers decide how much AI to incorporate and where. The framework is built on open standards, meaning files are text‑based and readable by any tool.
"The AI can read files and do things with it," Brussee noted. "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 industry is divided on AI’s role. Some commentators on LinkedIn hype "click‑to‑game" promises, suggesting that a single prompt could spawn a Grand Theft Auto‑scale experience. Immens’ team sees AI more modestly as a powerful assistant rather than a replacement. Valient said, "The big games and everything in between will be done because AI made everybody better.
It has negative connotations right now because it is disrupting everything at a scale that nobody has seen." Economic anxieties also linger, with fears of an AI bubble inflating valuations without substance. Valient compared it to the dot‑com era, arguing that while many companies will fall, solid technology and products will survive.
"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," he said. Funding remains modest. Immens has secured its "first commitments" but has not disclosed amounts, describing them as "reasonable." Brussee cautioned against excess capital, noting that too much money can breed complacency.
The company remains lean—just the three founders plus a handful of helpers—by design. De Jong explained the trade‑off: a massive team does not guarantee success in such a complex undertaking; a focused, small group can iterate more thoughtfully while still meeting the narrow window of opportunity presented by the AI surge. Immens is currently targeting a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a generative‑AI‑driven editing workflow, slated for release this month.
The timeline has already outpaced their original projection: what they thought would take until year‑end is now arriving in half that time. As for monetisation, Brussee admires Epic’s "you succeed when we succeed" model but admits it is too early to commit to a specific strategy. 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."