The European video game industry has been in an awkward position for years: its major studios create global hits, yet many of the most important technological foundations remain outside European control. CD Projekt, Larian Studios, and other heavyweight developers build their worlds on tools such as Unreal Engine 5, whose code, business terms, and strategic direction are tied to American companies. Arjan Brussee, co-founder of Guerrilla Games and former global product director for Unreal Engine, now wants to change that with The Immense Engine, a European graphics engine built around integrated AI.

There is an uncomfortable truth sitting in the middle of the European video game industry, and for years the sector has largely behaved as if it were just part of the furniture. Europe can make world-class games, as shown by the studios behind The Witcher, Cyberpunk 2077, Divinity, and Baldur’s Gate 3, yet those same teams often rely on core technologies they do not control. The dominance of Unreal Engine 5 is not accidental: it is powerful, mature, well documented, and has become an industry standard. Still, when the essential tools of an entire creative industry are controlled by corporations on another continent, that is no longer just a technical issue. It becomes a strategic dependency.

Arjan Brussee addressed exactly that point on the Dutch tech podcast De Technoloog. The co-founder of Guerrilla Games, who later served as global director of product management for Unreal Engine at Epic Games, is now working on a graphics engine developed in Europe, by Europeans, and under European rules and expectations. The project is called The Immense Engine, and it is being built in the Netherlands in collaboration with a Dutch startup. Brussee did not unveil it with a huge stage show, but the ambition is still obvious: he wants to create a technological foundation that could eventually become a real alternative to Unreal Engine 5, especially for European studios.

A European Engine To Compete With Unreal Engine 5?

Brussee’s wording was direct: “No one is currently making an engine that is entirely based in Europe, built by Europeans, and that complies with European standards and guidelines.” The Immense Engine, however, is not being designed only for video games. According to the former Unreal Engine executive, the technology is also aimed at sectors such as defense and logistics, where the creation of usable 3D worlds is becoming increasingly important. That already makes the project look less like a narrow experiment for small game teams and more like a broader industrial platform that could serve games, simulations, and more serious enterprise applications at the same time.

According to Brussee, the key difference is not only the engine’s European origin, but the fact that artificial intelligence is being treated as a core component from the start. Current engines still rely heavily on menu-driven, manual development workflows: developers search, click, configure, reconfigure, and then try to keep everything coherent as the project grows. Brussee wants a system in which AI is not an optional add-on or a shiny marketing badge, but part of the engine’s basic structure. Agents such as Claude or ChatGPT would exist as modules inside the software, and new large language models could be integrated with relative ease.

Brussee believes that this could radically change what smaller teams are able to do: “If you’re smart and know how to put a good AI agent framework to work, you can do the work of 10 or 15 people.” That sentence is both a promise and a warning label. Such an engine could genuinely help smaller European studios avoid drowning in technological debt, content production costs, and modern visual expectations. At the same time, AI-based development immediately raises questions about quality, oversight, copyright, and labor. A European engine can only become a serious alternative if it makes production faster while also operating more cleanly, legally, ethically, and technically, than the usual rushed AI trend-chasing solutions.

The bad news is that The Immense Engine still has no release date, and no official technical specifications have been published. It is not yet clear what rendering solutions it will use, what its licensing model will look like, how compatible it will be with current development workflows, or how far it can go with open worlds, cinematic visuals, physics, networking, and modern asset pipelines. What is already clear, however, is that Brussee is not trying to patch a small hole. He is attempting to build the kind of European technological answer the continent’s game industry has needed for a long time. Unreal Engine 5 will not lose its throne tomorrow morning because of a Dutch startup, but at least someone has finally said the quiet part out loud: Europe cannot remain a tenant forever in its own creative industry.

Source: 3DJuegos