For many years, Unity and Unreal have been the de‑facto platforms for game creation, accounting for roughly seventy percent of all titles released on Steam in 2025. While open‑source alternatives such as Godot have enjoyed a surge in popularity and some publishers continue to rely on proprietary solutions—Capcom’s RE Engine being a notable example—the market has largely been dominated by the two giants.
Against this backdrop, three seasoned industry veterans—Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient—have launched a new venture called Immens, convinced that there is still room for a fresh engine that addresses the shortcomings of existing tools. The founders bring an impressive résumé: experience at Epic Games (the creators of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and even Apple. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee argued that the timing is ripe for a novel engine, noting that "a few years ago the idea of an AI‑enhanced workflow simply didn’t exist." He believes that, with AI‑assisted programming, developers can return to building projects from the ground up while retaining tight oversight and rapid iteration. "Under a lot of guidance and control, you can build something that can bring full functionality fast," he explained.
Valient, Immens’ chief technology officer, clarified that the AI they are integrating is not the kind that generates assets from a single text prompt. Instead, the AI is embedded in the engine’s architecture to make the codebase highly extensible. "AI can reason about large amounts of data and the code base very well," he said. "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 a custom particle system, let me add it there.’" This approach aims to let developers harness AI to accelerate extensions rather than replace the creative process. The motivation behind Immens is rooted in the current economic pressures facing game studios. Brussee described the environment as "rough," emphasizing that development costs are spiralling and that many studios struggle to stay afloat.
"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?" By leveraging AI to automate repetitive tasks and streamline pipelines, Immens hopes to lower the barrier to entry for smaller teams.
De Jong, the chief product officer, pointed out that the engine market has become overly standardized and consolidated. While this has provided a solid foundation, he argues that the industry now needs genuine 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 highlighted is the monolithic nature of current engines. Developers must conform to proprietary file formats and rigid workflows, limiting flexibility. With AI, Immens aims to deliver an engine that adapts to the user 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, 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 behave unpredictably if left unchecked.
Immens therefore emphasizes transparency and control: users will always be able to see what the engine is doing, review its decision history, and ensure repeatable outcomes. "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 team illustrated this with a hypothetical workflow: instead of spending weeks manually crafting five characters with a specific trait, a developer could prompt the AI, let it generate a baseline while sipping coffee, then fine‑tune the result. The generated tool could be used repeatedly and discarded when no longer needed, dramatically reducing cost and time. Flexibility extends to the engine’s overall architecture. De Jong stressed that Immens does not force a particular workflow on its users.
"It’s up to you how you want to use it," he said. "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 cornerstone of Immens’ design.
By relying on open, text‑based standards, the engine can seamlessly exchange data with popular tools such as Blender, Maya, or any generative‑AI pipeline. "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.
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." The broader conversation about AI in game development is often polarized.
Some commentators on LinkedIn predict a future where a single prompt can spawn a Grand Theft Auto‑scale experience, sparking fear of "click‑to‑game" solutions. Immens acknowledges the hype but frames AI as a tool rather than 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." De Jong added a responsible‑use perspective: "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 linger. Critics worry that AI‑centric startups are inflating a bubble with unrealistic valuations. Valient compared the situation to the dot‑com era, arguing that while many companies will fail, the underlying technology will endure. "With the dotcom 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 exact figures, describing the amount as "reasonable." Brussee cautioned against over‑capitalisation, noting that excess cash can breed 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 remains tiny—just the three founders plus a handful of helpers—by design.
De Jong explained the trade‑off between team size and speed: a massive staff does not guarantee success in such a complex undertaking; a focused, lean group can make deliberate decisions and iterate quickly, especially given the narrow window of opportunity presented by AI’s rise. Immens is currently building a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a generative‑AI‑driven editing workflow.
The team aims to release this demo within the month, already having accelerated their timeline dramatically. "When we started in April, we thought that would probably take us until the end of the year," Brussee said. "So we’re already two times faster than we anticipated. It’s really hard to make a reasonable statement about timelines." Business‑model discussions are ongoing.
While Immens admires Epic’s "we succeed when you succeed" licensing philosophy, they consider it premature to make definitive statements about pricing or revenue sharing. Ultimately, the founders hope their engine 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."