For many years the game‑development world has been dominated by Unity and Unreal, which together powered roughly 70% of all Steam releases slated for 2025. While Godot has enjoyed a surge in popularity and some major studios still cling to proprietary solutions—Capcom’s RE Engine being a prime example—the market has largely been a duopoly. Into this entrenched landscape step three seasoned veterans: Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient, the founders of Immens.
Their résumés read like a who’s‑who of the industry, featuring stints at Epic Games (the creators of Unreal), Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and even Apple. The trio believes there is still room for a fresh engine and, more importantly, for a better way to build games. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee argued that the timing is now ripe for a new platform that simply didn’t exist a few years ago.
He pointed to the rapid progress of AI‑assisted programming as a catalyst that could 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’s chief technology officer, clarified that the AI they are integrating is not the kind of generative prompt‑driven magic that dominates headlines. Instead, their AI is woven into the engine’s architecture to make it 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‑centric engine stems from the current economic climate of game development, which Brussee describes as "rough." Production costs keep climbing, making it harder for small studios to survive.
"It's really hard to be successful making games," he noted. "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, observes that the engine market has become overly standardized and consolidated. While this has given developers 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 De Jong’s key criticisms of existing engines is their monolithic nature.
Developers must conform to proprietary file formats and workflows that often feel forced. With AI, Immens aims to flip that relationship: the engine should adapt to the creator. "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 acknowledges AI’s power but also its volatility.
"It can also go off the rails really quickly if you don't pay attention," he warned. To keep developers in the driver’s seat, Immens logs every AI action, providing a transparent history that can be replayed or audited.
This reproducibility lets teams build bespoke tools for specific problems—like generating a set of characters with particular traits—in minutes rather than weeks. "Now you can probably dream it up while drinking coffee and eating breakfast. That tool could be used like five times and then thrown away. This used to be super expensive.
You really can make workflows that work exactly for what you want to do. That's really powerful," Valient added. Flexibility is baked into Immens’s core. The engine does not impose a single workflow; instead, it offers a modular architecture that lets users decide how much AI to employ and where.
"It's up to you how you want to use it," De Jong emphasized. "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 pillar of the project. By embracing open, text‑based standards, Immens ensures that files can be read and manipulated by any tool, from Blender to Maya to custom pipelines.
"The moment you have files that are text based, anything can read it," Brussee explained. "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 community remains divided on AI’s role in game creation.
Some pundits hype a future where a single prompt spawns a Grand Theft Auto‑scale experience. Immens’s founders temper such hype, viewing AI as an enhancer 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." Economic anxieties also loom, with many questioning whether AI is a bubble. Valient draws a parallel to the dot‑com era: the internet didn’t disappear, even though many early companies failed. "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." Funding remains modest.
Immens has secured its first commitments but has not disclosed amounts, describing them as "reasonable." Brussee cautions against over‑funding, noting that excess capital 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 team remains lean—just the three founders plus a handful of helpers—by design. They argue that building an engine is a complex undertaking that cannot be rushed by sheer manpower.
Instead, a small, focused group can make deliberate decisions and iterate quickly, especially as AI accelerates development cycles. "We need a small set of people to gradually build it up and come to certain decisions and realizations. That takes time.
On the other hand, there is a window of opportunity here over the next few years because of all the changes happening with the industry, with AI coming up," De Jong said. Immens is currently targeting a proof‑of‑concept demo that showcases a full editing workflow powered by generative AI, slated for release this month.
The timeline has already outpaced their original expectations—what they thought would take until year‑end is now arriving in half that time. "So it's really hard to make a reasonable statement about timelines," Brussee admitted.
As for the business model, Immens admires Epic’s revenue‑share approach but admits it is too early to commit to a specific structure. Ultimately, Brussee hopes the engine will enable creators to push artistic boundaries, take risks, and deliver more innovative experiences. "We all love games. We love complex expressions of the art form and want to see more of that," he 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."