Former Epic director is building a European rival to the Unreal and Unity game engines — 'The Immense Engine' dev sees opportunity for AI agents to 'do the work of ten or fifteen people'

Former Epic Games director Arjan Brussee is building The Immense Engine, a fully European-hosted game engine aimed at competing with Unreal and Unity. The project is positioned for gaming plus 3D simulation use cases in defense, logistics, and government, with AI agents expected to potentially let small teams do the work of 10 to 15 people. The article is largely strategic and speculative, with limited near-term market impact.

Analysis

This is less a gaming story than a sovereignty and procurement story. A Europe-first engine, if it clears certification and data-residency hurdles, could become a default layer for public-sector simulation, training, and digital-twin work where buyers value compliance and supply-chain control over feature breadth. The second-order effect is that a credible non-U.S. stack lowers switching friction for defense primes, civil engineering firms, and municipal IT shops that have been hesitant to standardize on American tools for strategic workloads.

The AI-agent angle matters more for margins than for product headlines. If the team can truly compress headcount requirements by 30-50% in engine development and downstream content creation, the venture’s economic model improves sharply: lower burn, faster iteration, and a better chance of surviving long enough to achieve ecosystem lock-in. But that same claim also raises execution risk, because AI-assisted code generation tends to amplify technical debt unless the architecture is ruthlessly modular; a bloated engine would be dead on arrival against entrenched incumbents.

The contrarian read is that the most valuable asset may not be the engine itself but the compliance wrapper and hosted deployment model. Even without winning mainstream game developers, a “European-certified simulation stack” could monetize via government contracts, defense exercises, logistics planning, and industrial training, where gross margins can be attractive and customer switching costs are sticky. The timeline is years, not quarters: the near-term catalyst is partnership announcements, while the main downside is that the project becomes an admirable demo but fails to cross the distribution threshold.

For public equities, the cleaner expression is not to chase a direct beneficiary, since there is no listed pure-play here, but to position around the implied pressure on incumbent engine vendors and adjacent cloud infrastructure. If European buyers begin mandating local hosting, it is mildly negative for U.S.-centric SaaS and cloud capture rates in regulated workflows, while being supportive for European sovereign cloud and systems integrators.

Key Decisions for Investors

• No direct listed pure-play exists; if you want optionality on European sovereign software demand, consider a small basket long of SAP and large European IT services names over 6-12 months, funded by a short in a U.S.-centric collaboration/software name exposed to public-sector workflows. Thesis: procurement localization could shift low-single-digit share of regulated workloads.
• Watch for partnership/certification news over the next 3-6 months; if the engine signs a defense, infrastructure, or public-sector pilot, buy near-dated call spreads on European defense primes that sell simulation/training systems, as the market will likely price in incremental software and services attach.
• Fade any hype-driven move in game-engine incumbents only if evidence emerges of real enterprise adoption. Until then, avoid shorting the incumbents outright; the likely market impact is too small versus their broader monetization mix.
• For event-driven exposure, use a calendar: initiate only after the first credible customer win. That preserves upside while avoiding a value trap if the product remains a research project for 12-24 months.