For many years, Unity and Unreal have been the dominant forces in game creation, powering roughly 70% of the titles that appeared on Steam in 2025. While Godot has made notable strides recently and some large studios cling to proprietary solutions—Capcom’s RE Engine being a prime example—the market has largely been a duopoly.
Yet three seasoned industry veterans, Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient, believe there is still space for a fresh engine that addresses the shortcomings of the current offerings. The three founders now lead Immens, a startup that aims to build an AI‑enhanced game engine tailored for smaller teams and individual creators.
Their résumés read like a who's‑who of the gaming world: experience at Epic Games (the creators of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, Apple, and more. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee explained that the timing feels right for a new engine because "the tools that existed a couple of years ago simply aren’t enough anymore." According to Brussee, the breakthrough comes from AI‑assisted programming, which allows developers to start from a clean slate while still receiving guided support.
"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, stresses that the AI they employ is not the "prompt‑to‑output" variety that dominates headlines.
Instead, the AI is woven into the engine’s architecture to make the codebase highly extensible. "The great thing is 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," he explained. "They are not just limited to a bit of scripting; they can add a custom particle system, a bespoke physics module, or any other feature they need." The motivation behind Immens is rooted in the current economic climate of game development.
Brussee describes the environment as "rough," noting that production costs keep climbing and studios are forced to gamble larger budgets on ever‑more ambitious projects. "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, points out that the engine market has become overly standardized and consolidated.
While that standardisation provides a solid foundation, it also stifles 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 pain points De Jong highlights is the monolithic nature of existing engines. Developers often have to adapt to proprietary file formats and rigid pipelines. With AI, Immens aims to deliver an engine that bends to the developer’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. 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 acknowledges that AI is powerful but can also behave unpredictably if left unchecked. To mitigate this, Immens is built to keep the user in full control of the engine’s actions, providing a transparent history of changes so developers can reproduce results reliably.
"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." The flexibility extends to workflow design.
Immens does not impose a single development approach; instead, it offers a modular framework where teams decide how much AI assistance they want and where to apply it. De Jong emphasizes that the architecture is deliberately open, allowing creators to plug in external tools such as Blender, Maya, or any generative‑AI system via open standards. "The moment you have files that are text based, anything can read it," Brussee added. "The AI can read files and do things with it.
More and more companies are building that into their tools, so they become much easier to interoperate." There is a vocal backlash against AI in game development, with some critics warning that future engines could let anyone generate a Grand Theft Auto‑level experience with a single prompt. Immens’ team concedes that a "click‑to‑game" vision might one day be feasible, but they view AI primarily as an accelerator for human creativity, not a replacement.
"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 swirl around the AI hype, with many fearing a bubble of over‑valued startups.
Valient argues that, like the dot‑com era, the technology itself will endure even if some companies fall away. "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." Immens has not disclosed specific funding amounts but mentions having secured "first commitments" and intentionally keeping the team lean—just the three founders and a handful of helpers. Brussee warns against excessive capital, noting that too much money can lead to 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 company is currently developing a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a generative‑AI‑driven editing workflow, slated for release within the month. The timeline has already outpaced their original expectations: "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," Brussee said.
As for the business model, Immens is still exploring options. While they admire Epic’s "we succeed when you succeed" licensing approach, they admit it is too early to make definitive statements.
Ultimately, the founders hope their engine will empower creators to push the artistic boundaries of games, encouraging risk‑taking and innovation. "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."