Sjoerd De Jong, who spent 12 years as Epic Games' "lead evangelist" for Unreal Engine, has announced his next venture: the creation of a new game engine called Immens Engine. De Jong departed Epic last month, citing the game industry's "pivotal point" and a desire to address the evolving needs of game development.
In an interview, De Jong revealed his plans for Immens, which he is building with a small team including former Epic technical director Arjan Brussee. The stated goal of Immens Engine is to provide an alternative to the market dominance of Unreal Engine and Unity, which De Jong believes has led to a "stagnation" in game development. He suggests that challengers like Godot are only now emerging to address this.
"[Unreal and Unity] get bigger and bigger, [and there's] more and more baggage that builds over time," De Jong explained. "So you wonder if there's got to be something here where we can [have] a clean, modern engine built from the ground up."
The Immens Engine is intended to offer developers a more "bespoke" toolset, designed from its inception to integrate external tools, services, and libraries. This approach contrasts with what De Jong perceives as the "ballooning toolset" of existing engines that often require retrofitting features.
One key area Immens aims to accommodate is agentic AI. De Jong acknowledged this is a "hot topic" and expressed skepticism about the ability of existing development tools, built primarily for human interaction, to effectively serve agentic AI. While Immens is being designed to be "friendly to an AI architecture," De Jong emphasized that it is a "proper game engine" and not an "AI engine." He stated the intention is not to create a tool for automatically generating games, but rather to provide a flexible platform for developers.