New engine you say, AI engine.
Immens founders Arjan Brussee co-founded Guerrilla Games, spent eight years at Epic as technical director and product management director for Unreal, and helped ship UE5. Sjoerd De Jong put 27 years into Unreal Engine, the last 12 at Epic as senior director for developers. Michal Valient was the CTO.
They left the big company and now they're building a competitor.
The AI part, which isn't what you think
Immens is not going to be a prompt-a-game engine and Valient was firm on that.
"The AI in Immens is about building the engine in a way that is really extensible," he said. "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."
His example: a solo developer deciding they want a custom particle system and just adding one, rather than being confined to scripting around whatever the engine already does.
Brussee's argument for why now is straightforward, "Under a lot of guidance and control, you can build something that can bring full functionality fast."
The technology is "really powerful," he said, but "it can also go off the rails really quickly if you don't pay attention." Immens is being designed so users can see what it's doing and reproduce it themselves.
The pitch against Unreal and Unity
The dominance of two engines gave the industry a solid foundation, then stopped giving it anything else, there is no innovation
"Now we need innovation, not standardisation," he said. "That's what we're pushing for. There must be a different way."
Immens aims to to invert that, by allowing individual developers build tools shaped around their own project.
They stated that the games are getting more expensive, success is harder, and "you need to do something to break out of that cycle."
Open standards
Text-based files, readable by anything, including AI will be the base.
"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," Brussee said.
Brussee's original pitch also emphasized a European angle, an engine fully hosted in Europe, built by Europeans, compliant with EU rules, positioned against American and Chinese alternatives.
On the bubble
Asked whether AI valuations might collapse, Valient stated,
"With the dotcom bubble, did the internet go away? No. All the 'I have a domain, give me money' companies went away." His position is that Immens is building a good engine first, with AI making that faster. "Apparently, you don't know we are in a bubble until it bursts."
On the broader backlash, De Jong: "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."
Money and timeline
No announced investment, though there are first commitments.
"There's always a danger with being a startup that you can have too much money," Brussee said. "You also get lazy, when you need to be scrappy."
Headcount is three founders plus some helpers, deliberately. De Jong describes the trade-off as needing a small team to make the early architectural calls, against a window of opportunity that won't stay open indefinitely.
A proof of concept showing generative AI editing flow was planned for this month. Work started in April, and Brussee says they're running roughly twice as fast as projected, which he admits makes timelines hard to state with confidence.
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