Breaking the Monolith: Can Immens Disrupt the Stagnant Game Engine Market?

For over a decade, the landscape of game development has been defined by a rigid, dual-polar existence. Unity and Unreal Engine, the undisputed titans of the industry, powered roughly 70% of all games released on Steam in 2025. While smaller players like Godot have carved out a niche for themselves and giants like Capcom continue to pour resources into proprietary, bespoke solutions like the RE Engine, the vast majority of developers have been forced to conform to the "monolithic" workflows of the two industry leaders.

However, a new challenger is emerging from the shadows. Immens, a studio founded by industry veterans Arjan Brussee, Sjoerd De Jong, and Michal Valient, is betting that the current state of engine development is ripe for disruption. With collective experience spanning Epic Games, Guerrilla Games, Boss Key, and Apple, the trio is not just building another engine; they are attempting to fundamentally change the relationship between the developer, the tool, and the code.

The State of Play: A Market in Need of Evolution

The game development industry is currently navigating a period of unprecedented economic turbulence. Production costs for AAA titles have ballooned to unsustainable levels, and the "standardization" that once provided a solid foundation for developers has, according to the Immens founders, curdled into a bottleneck.

"It’s really hard to be successful making games," says Arjan Brussee. "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?"

The current market dynamic—characterized by massive consolidation—has created a "one-size-fits-all" trap. Developers are often forced to adapt their creative visions to the constraints of the software, rather than the software adapting to the creative needs of the developer. Immens aims to reverse this power dynamic by leveraging the recent, rapid maturation of AI.

Chronology: From Concept to Proof of Concept

The inception of Immens began in April 2024, born from a shared realization among the founders that the "window of opportunity" for a new, AI-native engine was finally opening.

• April 2024: The Immens team officially begins development, initially anticipating a long, arduous road to a functional proof-of-concept.
• Late 2024: The team reports that, thanks to the integration of AI-assisted programming, they are progressing at double their original projected speed.
• January 2025: Immens prepares to debut its first proof-of-concept, a demonstration focused on the "flow of editing" through generative AI, intended to prove that their framework can handle rapid, iterative changes.
• Future Outlook: The team is currently balancing the need for "reasonable" funding against the danger of becoming "lazy" through over-capitalization, focusing on maintaining a lean, scrappy development cycle as they move toward an eventual public release.

Supporting Data: Why Now?

The technical argument for Immens lies in the concept of "extensibility." While many associate AI in game development with generating low-quality assets or automated prompts, the founders of Immens have a different vision. They view AI as an architectural partner—a tool capable of reasoning through complex code bases and facilitating a modular, plugin-friendly environment.

"The AI in Immens is about building the engine in a way that is really extensible," says Michal Valient, the company’s Chief Technology Officer. "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… They can come in and say, ‘I want my custom particle system,’ and add it."

To achieve this, Immens is leaning heavily into open standards. By moving away from proprietary file formats that lock developers into a single ecosystem, Immens aims to allow seamless interoperability with industry staples like Blender, Maya, and various generative AI tools.

"The moment you have files that are text-based, anything can read it," Brussee explains. "The AI can read files and do things with it. 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."

Official Responses: Navigating the AI Backlash

The discourse surrounding AI in gaming is notoriously polarized. On one side are the "prompt-enthusiasts" who promise a future where a single user can create a Grand Theft Auto-scale game with a few sentences; on the other are critics who fear the degradation of artistic integrity and the displacement of human labor.

The Immens team positions itself in the pragmatic middle. They view AI as a "tool," not a replacement for human creative agency.

"It has negative connotations right now because it is disrupting everything at a scale that nobody has seen," Valient admits. "But 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."

Sjoerd De Jong, Chief Product Officer, emphasizes the responsibility that comes with this technology. "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 the "bubble" narrative currently surrounding AI startups, Valient remains unfazed. He likens the current climate to the dotcom boom of the late 90s. "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. We are first and foremost making a good engine."

Implications: A New Era of Development?

The implications of the Immens approach, if successful, could be transformative. By lowering the barrier to entry for building complex, bespoke tools, the engine could theoretically empower smaller, leaner teams to punch above their weight class. It challenges the status quo of "monolithic" engines that require thousands of man-hours to master.

However, the team is under no illusions about the difficulty of their task. Building a game engine is notoriously complex, and challenging the entrenched market dominance of Unity and Epic Games is a Herculean effort. The founders are deliberately keeping their team small and "scrappy," wary of the pitfalls of bloating their operations too early.

"Making an engine is a very complex endeavour," De Jong says. "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 realizations."

As the industry watches, the success of Immens will likely depend on whether they can deliver on the promise of a "flexible" workflow. If they can provide an environment where a developer can dream up a tool, build it in a morning, and discard it once the task is complete, they may have found the "holy grail" of modern game production.

Ultimately, the goal is not to force users into a new way of working, but to offer them the autonomy to choose their own. Whether the industry is ready to abandon the comfort of the current standard for the potential of an AI-augmented, modular future remains the defining question of the coming year. For the founders of Immens, the answer is clear: the industry is stifled by the status quo, and the time for innovation is now.