Three Epic Veterans Are Building an AI-Powered Game Engine to Break the Industry's Doom Cycle

In the current gaming landscape, Unity and Unreal Engine have long held a dominant position, powering approximately 70% of games released on Steam in 2025. While Godot has experienced notable growth and some major companies continue to utilize proprietary engines like Capcom's RE Engine, Unity and Unreal largely control the game engine market.

However, Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient, the founders of Immens, believe there's space for a new engine, along with significant room for improvement. With impressive track records from companies such as Epic Games, Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and Apple, these industry veterans are prepared to challenge the established giants.

Arjan Brussee explained that "there's an opportunity now" to create a new engine that "didn't exist a couple of years ago." He added, "With the help of AI-supported programming, you can probably start making things from scratch again. Under a lot of guidance and control, you can build something that can bring full functionality fast."

Michal Valient, Immens' Chief Technology Officer, clarified that their approach to AI differs from common perceptions. It's not about generating content with simple prompts. Instead, "The AI in Immens is about building the engine in a way that is really extensible." Valient elaborated, "The great thing is AI can reason about a lot of data and the codebase really well. If we design the codebase 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'." This allows developers to leverage AI to enhance the engine more rapidly.

Tough Times

A key motivation for developing this new AI-powered game engine stems from the current state of the gaming market, which Brussee describes as "rough." He stated, "It's really hard to be successful making games. 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?"

Sjoerd De Jong, Immens' Chief Product Officer, observed a "standardisation and consolidation" in the engine space. While this has provided a "solid foundation," he believes the industry now requires more. "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," De Jong said. "Now we need innovation, not standardisation. That's what we're pushing for. There must be a different way."

De Jong also expressed concern about the "monolithic approach" of current game engines, which often forces developers to adapt to the software and its proprietary file formats. He envisions an AI-powered engine that adapts to user needs, emphasizing its flexibility. "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, 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."

"You really can make workflows that work exactly for what you want to do."

Michal Valient

Valient acknowledges AI's potential pitfalls, noting that while "it can also go off the rails really quickly if you don't pay attention." He assures that Immens is being built with user control in mind: "We are building Immens so that when you are using the engine, you are in control of what it is doing. You know what it's doing. You know the history of how it's doing it, so that you know it is repeatable. You can also create bespoke tools. The nature of the creative process is that you have a problem to solve: for example, creating five characters with this specific trait. Previously, you would have to plan this and perhaps work for weeks to get it done. 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."

Flexible

Immens is designed for flexibility, avoiding the imposition of "a particular workflow or approach" on its users, according to De Jong. "It's up to you how you want to use it," he added. "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."

"If you want to use something like Blender or Maya or generative stuff or our own stuff, you can just plug it in."

Arjan Brussee

Furthermore, Immens is being developed to utilize open standards, facilitating interoperability with other common game development software. "The moment you have files that are text based, anything can read it," Brussee stated. "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. Sometimes the engines are the weird outlier; they don't really nicely interoperate with those open standards. It's about how we can embrace some of this stuff so we have smarter interfaces with everything. 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. For some reason those things have not been solved by bespoke technology so far."

While there is significant apprehension surrounding AI in game development, particularly regarding exaggerated claims of effortless game creation, the Immens team views AI primarily as a "tool." Valient remarked, "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." De Jong added, "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."

Regarding economic concerns and the potential for an AI bubble, Valient expressed a pragmatic view. "There is a lot of anxiety, but let's be honest: is AI going away? No. 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

Immens has not yet announced any formal investment but has secured "first commitments" for funding. The founders remain tight-lipped about the exact amount they are seeking, describing it as "reasonable." Brussee cautioned against excessive funding, noting, "There's always a danger with being a startup that you can have too much money. You also get lazy, when you need to be scrappy."

The company is currently lean, comprising only the three founders and a few "helpers." This deliberate small size, coupled with reasonable funding, is strategic. De Jong elaborated on the balancing act: "There's also a balance. On the one hand, making an engine is a very complex endeavor, so you can't just throw a million people at it and expect it to work. You need a small set of people [to] gradually build it up and come to certain decisions and realisations. That takes time. On the other hand, there is a window of opportunity here over the next few years, I think, because of all the changes happening with the industry, with AI coming up. How do you make sure you hit that window of opportunity and you have enough funding and enough of a team there to do that, while at the same time not just dumping all the people on and expecting it to work? That's the trade-off we're in and we're working through."

"Making an engine is a very complex endeavor."

Sjoerd De Jong

Immens is currently developing a proof of concept demonstrating the workflow of editing with generative AI, with plans for a demo release this month. Brussee noted their rapid progress: "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 we would go. So it's really hard to make a reasonable statement about timelines."

The business model is still in its early stages, though Brussee expressed an affinity for Epic's "we succeed when you succeed" approach, stating it's "too early to make any meaningful statements there."

Ultimately, Brussee hopes Immens will contribute to creating games that drive the industry forward. "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."