Three Epic veterans are building an AI-powered game engine to break the industry's doom cycle

Three Epic veterans are trying to carve out space in a market long dominated by Unity and Unreal with Immens, a new engine built around AI-assisted extensibility rather than generative gimmicks. The founders are Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient, whose backgrounds span Epic, Guerrilla, Boss Key, and Apple.

Their core argument is that the industry needs a way to break out of rising costs and increasingly risky production cycles. Brussee says games are getting more expensive to make, while De Jong argues the engine market has settled into standardisation and consolidation when developers now need more innovation and flexibility.

Immens is being designed so teams can extend the engine more easily, create bespoke tools, and plug into open standards instead of being locked into a monolithic workflow. Valient stresses that the AI is meant to keep developers in control, with repeatable, inspectable changes rather than opaque prompt-driven output.

The team is also positioning the engine against the current AI backlash by framing it as a productivity tool, not a replacement for developers. They acknowledge the bubble concerns around AI, but see the technology as durable and expect weaker products to fall away while useful ones survive.