Unity and Unreal have dominated the development scene for a long time now, and were used to make roughly 70% of the games released on Steam in 2025. Godot has seen some significant growth in the past few years, and many big companies still favour proprietary engines – like Capcom with its RE Engine – but otherwise, Unity and Unreal have got the game engine market sewn up.
Yet Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient, the founders of Immens, think there is room for a new engine on the scene – and room for improvement. The industry veterans’ CVs cover an impressive range of big-name companies, including Unreal maker Epic Games, Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and Apple, and the trio are ready to challenge the industry titans.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Brussee says that “there’s an opportunity now” to build a new engine that “didn’t exist a couple of years ago.”
“With the help of AI-supported programming, you can probably start making things from scratch again,” he says. “Under a lot of guidance and control, you can build something that can bring full functionality fast.”
Valient, the chief technology officer for Immens, emphasises that this isn’t AI in the way that many people in the space have become used to talking about the technology. He says that Immens isn’t about prompting stuff into existence.
“The AI in Immens is about building the engine in a way that is really extensible,” he says. “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. 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.”
Tough times
Part of the motive behind making this new AI-powered game engine is the current state of the games market. Brussee describes the situation as “rough”.
“It’s really hard to be successful making games,” he says. “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’ chief product officer, says that there has been a “standardisation and consolidation” in the engine space, and that while this has provided a “solid foundation”, the industry needs more now.
“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 says. “Now we need innovation, not standardisation. That’s what we’re pushing for. There must be a different way.”
One concern that De Jong has about current game engines is that they represent a “monolithic approach”. Developers have to adapt to the software in front of them. They need to deal with proprietary file formats. But with AI, he says users will have an engine that adapts to their needs.
“You really can make workflows that work exactly for what you want to do”
Michal Valient
“It needs to be very flexible,” he explains. “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 is aware that AI has its shortcomings; as he says, the technology is “really powerful,” but “it can also go off the rails really quickly if you don’t pay attention.”
“We are building Immens so that when you are using the engine, you are in control of what it is doing,” he says. “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 built with flexibility in mind. The tech doesn’t force “a particular workflow or approach” onto its users, says De Jong.
“It’s up to you how you want to use it,” he adds. “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
Immens is also being designed to use open standards in order to make it interoperate with other software commonly used in game development.
“The moment you have files that are text based, anything can read it,” Brussee says. “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.”
There is a big backlash to AI in game development in some quarters. Some of this is fuelled by boosters who take to LinkedIn, posting that soon people will be able to bring Grand Theft Auto-level experiences into existence with just a prompt.
While the Immens team says that one day “click-to-game” engines could be a possibility, ultimately they see the tech as a “tool”.
“The big games and everything in between will be done because AI made everybody better,” Valient says. “It has negative connotations right now because it is disrupting everything at a scale that nobody has seen.”
De Jong adds: “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.”
In addition to the creative impact of AI, there are anxieties about the economics of it. Specifically, there are concerns about the sector being a bubble that boasts inflated valuations that bear little grounding in reality. If there is a bubble, Immens isn’t too concerned about it bursting.
“There is a lot of anxiety, but let’s be honest: is AI going away? No,” Valient says. “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
So far, Immens hasn’t announced any investment, but the company has had its “first commitments” for funding. The founders also won’t say how much cash they are after initially, either, save to say that the amount is “reasonable”. But Brussee says excessive funding isn’t necessarily a good thing.
“There’s always a danger with being a startup that you can have too much money,” he laughs. “You also get lazy, when you need to be scrappy.”
The company is still very small, with just the three founders plus some “helpers”. Staying at this lean size with reasonable funding is intentional.
“There’s also a balance,” De Jong says. “On the one hand, making an engine is a very complex endeavour, 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 endeavour”
Sjoerd De Jong
Immens is currently working towards a proof of concept that will show “the flow of editing something” using generative AI, with the plan to launch the demo this month.
“When we started in April, we thought that would probably take us until the end of the year,” Brussee says. “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.”
There’s also the small matter of a business model to figure out. As with a lot of things here, it is still early days, but Brussee says that although Immens is a fan of Epic’s “we succeed when you succeed type approach,” it is “too early to make any meaningful statements there.”
Ultimately, Brussee says that he hopes Immens can help create games that push the industry forward.
“We all love games. We love complex expressions of the art form and want to see more of that,” he says. “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.”