Unity and Unreal have long held sway over game creation, accounting for roughly 70% of Steam releases in 2025. While Godot has gained traction and some studios cling to proprietary tools such as Capcom’s RE Engine, the market remains heavily dominated by the two giants.
Yet three seasoned industry veterans—Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient—believe there is still room for a fresh engine that addresses the shortcomings of the status quo. Their new venture, Immens, draws on impressive résumés that include stints at Epic Games (the makers of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and Apple, positioning the trio to take on the entrenched players. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee argued that the timing is right for a novel engine because "the opportunity didn’t exist a couple of years ago." He sees AI‑assisted programming as a catalyst that lets developers start from a clean slate again, offering guided yet flexible pathways to full‑featured builds. Valient, Immens’s CTO, clarifies that the AI they employ is not the “prompt‑to‑content” hype circulating online.
Instead, it serves as a reasoning layer that makes the engine’s codebase highly extensible. "If we design the architecture with AI in mind, even a solo creator can plug in a custom particle system or any other subsystem without being confined to a limited scripting environment," he explains.
The motivation behind Immens is rooted in the harsh economic reality of modern game development. Brussee describes the current climate as "rough," noting that production budgets keep inflating and the risk of failure is mounting.
He asks whether new workflows can break this cycle, allowing smaller teams to deliver quality experiences faster and with fewer resources. De Jong, the chief product officer, echoes this sentiment, observing that the engine landscape has become overly standardized and consolidated.
While standardization has provided a stable foundation, the industry now needs genuine innovation rather than incremental refinements. One of De Jong’s key criticisms of existing engines is their monolithic nature. Developers are forced to conform to proprietary file formats and rigid pipelines, limiting creativity.
By contrast, Immens aims to be a chameleon‑like platform that adapts to the user’s workflow. "You should be able to swap components, append new modules, and craft bespoke tools that match your personal shortcuts, interface preferences, and project requirements," he says.
This level of customisation is intended to empower creators to build exactly what they need, rather than bending their ideas to fit a pre‑determined system. Valient acknowledges that AI, while powerful, can veer off course if left unchecked. Immens therefore places the user in full control of the engine’s actions, preserving a transparent history of changes so that outcomes are repeatable and auditable. He illustrates the impact with a simple example: generating five distinct characters with specific traits used to require weeks of manual work; now, with AI‑augmented tools, a developer could sketch the concept over coffee and have a reusable pipeline that produces the assets in minutes.
This dramatic efficiency gain, he argues, can democratise high‑quality production. Flexibility is baked into Immens’s architecture. The team refuses to impose a single workflow, instead offering a modular framework where developers decide how much AI to incorporate and where.
De Jong stresses that the underlying AI must understand the developer’s intent correctly, which is why the engine is built around open standards and text‑based file formats. "When everything is plain text, any tool—be it Blender, Maya, or a generative model—can read and manipulate it," Brussee notes. This openness fosters seamless interoperability, a stark contrast to many proprietary engines that act as closed ecosystems.
The broader conversation about AI in games is often polarised. Some commentators on platforms like LinkedIn hype the notion of "click‑to‑game" engines that could spawn Grand Theft Auto‑scale worlds from a single prompt. Immens’s founders temper such expectations, viewing AI as a powerful assistant rather than a magical shortcut. Valient believes AI will elevate the entire industry, making developers more capable, though he warns that the technology’s disruptive scale can generate negative perceptions.
Economic anxieties also swirl around the AI boom, with fears of a bubble and inflated valuations. Valient draws a parallel to the dot‑com era, asserting that while many AI startups will fade, the underlying technology will endure.
"Our focus is on building a solid engine; AI simply accelerates our ability to dream bigger and iterate faster," he says. The team remains cautious about fundraising, having secured initial commitments but refusing to disclose exact figures. Brussee cautions against excessive capital, noting that too much money can breed complacency and erode the scrappy mindset essential for early‑stage innovation.
Immens remains a lean operation, consisting of the three founders and a handful of collaborators. This intentional size allows rapid decision‑making and keeps the project agile. De Jong explains the trade‑off: a massive team does not guarantee success in building a complex engine; instead, a focused group can iterate, learn, and adapt within the narrow window of opportunity presented by the AI wave.
The company is currently developing a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a generative‑AI‑driven editing workflow, slated for release later this month. Brussee reveals that the timeline has already outpaced their original expectations—what was projected to take until year‑end is now arriving in half that time. While the final business model is still under discussion, the founders admire Epic’s "we succeed when you succeed" philosophy but admit it is too early to commit to a specific licensing approach. Ultimately, Brussee hopes Immens will enable creators to push the artistic and technical boundaries of games.
"We love games and want to see more risk‑taking, more creativity, and more innovation," he says. "If our technology can help bring those bold ideas to life, that would be amazing."