In June, Sjoerd De Jong—an Unreal Engine modder and map creator turned full-time specialist at Epic Games—introduced that he was leaving the corporate after 12 years as a senior director and Unreal Engine “lead evangelist.” In a cryptic departure message, he mentioned the video games trade was at a “pivotal point,” and he is aiming to “work out how to adapt and excel” at addressing the altering wants of videogame growth.
We now have a clearer thought of De Jong’s plans for navigating the video games trade’s future. In an interview with This Week in Videogames, De Jong revealed what he is tackling subsequent: He’s constructing a sport engine of his personal.
De Jong’s nascent sport engine competitor known as the Immens Engine, and he is constructing it alongside a small staff of co-founders that features former Epic technical director Arjan Brussee.
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De Jong intends for Immens to function an alternative choice to the dominance of Unreal and Unity, whose market affect he mentioned has led to a “stagnation” in sport growth for which challengers like Godot have only just recently started to emerge.
“[Unreal and Unity] get bigger and bigger, [and there’s] more and more baggage that builds over time,” De Jong said. “So you wonder if there’s got to be something here where we can [have] a clean, modern engine built from the ground up.”
Rather than retrofitting features onto a ballooning toolset, De Jong said he hopes Immens can enable devs to create a “more bespoke” toolset of their own, while also being designed from day one to accommodate the “external tools, services, and libraries” that developers rely on.
De Jong said agentic AI is one of the external tools Immens is being built to enable—something he acknowledges is a “hot topic.”
Shortly before De Jong left the company, Epic revealed its focus for Unreal Engine’s future, envisioning a “central role” for “LLMs, generative AI models, and tools like Claude and Codex.” De Jong is skeptical that “those existing engines or existing [development] tools, that were made for humans over the years, are able to really serve [agentic AI].”
While Immens is being constructed to supply a extra accommodating growth platform for agentic AI to interface with, De Jong mentioned “it’s not an ‘AI engine'”—it is a “proper game engine that happens to be friendly to an AI architecture.”
Developers, he mentioned, are nonetheless going to must do the growing: “We don’t want [users to] press a button and generate a game, and then release it alongside the other five million games people have made that way.”