Guerrilla Games co-founder developing European game engine to rival Unreal and Unity

Guerrilla Games co-founder Arjan Brussee is developing Immensive Engine, a European-hosted game engine positioned as an alternative to Unreal and Unity. The project emphasizes EU compliance and AI-native development, with Brussee arguing AI agents could let a small team do the work of 10 to 15 people. The article is strategic and forward-looking rather than financial, with limited near-term market impact.

Analysis

This is less about a single game engine and more about a potential wedge into a strategic-sovereignty stack: if a Europe-hosted development platform gets traction, the beneficiaries are likely to be cloud, cybersecurity, compliance, and regional middleware providers rather than any one content studio. The first-order software winner is not necessarily the engine itself; it is the ecosystem around procurement-friendly, data-resident tooling that large publishers and public-sector adjacent simulation buyers can adopt without US jurisdictional friction. That makes the addressable market broader than gaming, but the commercialization path is also slower because enterprise trust, not feature parity, becomes the binding constraint.

The real second-order effect is competitive pressure on Unreal/Unity pricing power and developer lock-in, especially in Europe where regulatory and political preferences may increasingly influence engine selection in greenfield projects. Even a modest share shift could matter because the marginal economics of engines are highly leveraged: once studios standardize on pipelines, plugins, and talent pools, switching costs compound over multiple production cycles. That said, the AI-at-the-core pitch is only valuable if it compresses iteration time without creating hidden QA, determinism, or legal/IP liabilities; if those frictions emerge, the “AI-native” advantage could invert into an enterprise procurement objection.

The contrarian view is that the market may be underestimating the difficulty of building a credible engine moat from scratch in a field where content ecosystem, tooling depth, and developer mindshare matter more than ideology. A Europe-first positioning can win pilots, but it does not automatically win large AAA production budgets, and any delay in shipping a robust SDK or editor likely pushes revenue out by years rather than quarters. The upside scenario is a policy-supported procurement cycle in which governments, defense simulators, digital twins, and regulated industrial users become the anchor customers before games do; if that happens, the value accrues upstream to European infrastructure names that can host and secure the stack.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Long European cloud/infrastructure proxies with sovereign-data exposure on pullbacks over the next 3-12 months; focus on names benefiting from regional hosting and compliance demand. Risk/reward improves if the market starts pricing in a procurement-led adoption curve rather than consumer gaming adoption.
• Pair trade: long EU cyber/compliance beneficiaries vs. short a basket of engine-adjacent US platform names only if evidence emerges of studio migration or procurement mandates over 6-18 months. This is a low-conviction catalyst trade until a real customer list materializes.
• Buy optionality on European simulation/digital-twin software enablers for a 12-24 month horizon; the asymmetric upside is a new standards layer around regulated 3D workflows, while downside is limited to valuation if adoption stalls.
• Avoid chasing legacy engine incumbents on this headline alone; any competitive impact is likely a 2-5 year story, not a near-term earnings event. Reassess only if pricing concessions, partner churn, or developer-tooling adoption data show up.