Three Epic veterans are building an AI-powered game engine to break

What the report says

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 timesPart 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.

Key details

"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.

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"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.