Horizon Veterans Are Building a New Engine in Europe Too

Arjan Brussee, the former Epic Games executive who served as Global Product Management Director for Unreal Engine and a co-founder of Guerrilla Games, has revealed via foreign media that he has returned to the Netherlands and is now working on a new game engine called Immense Engine. Its target is explicit: Unreal Engine.

What makes this industry story interesting is not simply that another engine is entering the field, but how specifically it is positioning itself. Brussee's argument is that the market lacks a game engine that is genuinely hosted in Europe and fully aligned with European laws and regulatory requirements. That gives Immense Engine a more grounded pitch than the usual engine startup playbook. Rather than leading with raw rendering claims, it is trying to compete on regional compliance and technological sovereignty.

That framing also explains why the project is drawing attention so quickly. Brussee is not an outsider making broad claims. He has decades of game programming experience, helped found Guerrilla Games, worked directly on Unreal Engine, and contributed to the Horizon series. A developer with hands-on experience across proprietary engines, commercial middleware, and AAA production naturally brings more credibility than a typical startup team trying to build foundational tools from scratch.

Strategically, though, Immense Engine is going after the hardest part of the market. Unreal Engine does not dominate on technology alone. Its real strength is the surrounding ecosystem: tools, workflows, hiring pipelines, outsourcing compatibility, and the enormous volume of community knowledge around it. Developers often choose Unreal not because it is perfect, but because it is easier to staff, easier to integrate, and easier to support across a production pipeline. Any new engine that wants to matter will need more than the label of "alternative." It has to offer clear differentiation in areas like compliant deployment, localized service, and enterprise-grade support.

Another notable point is that Brussee is not limiting the engine's ambitions to games. He has said Immense Engine is also intended for industrial use cases including defense, logistics, and 3D simulation. That is a smart direction. Challenging a mature engine through the games market alone creates enormous commercial pressure. If the technology can first establish itself in more stable business-facing scenarios such as simulation, training, and visualization, it may have a better chance of building out its core capabilities.

Brussee has also made clear that the ambition goes beyond replacing American technology options such as Unreal Engine. In the long term, he wants Immense Engine to compete against advances coming from Chinese engine technology as well. That makes the project's positioning broader than a simple regional alternative, even if its immediate opening is clearly Europe-first.

Still, this is where some caution is necessary. Immense Engine is officially still in an early stage, and no meaningful technical details have been disclosed yet. For developers, that means it should be treated as a high-profile new project, not a production-ready solution that teams can realistically migrate to in the short term. For smaller studios especially, the right questions remain the practical ones: whether documentation is complete, whether cross-platform support is mature, and whether business terms are stable, not simply how impressive the founder's resume looks.

My read is that the bigger signal here is not that someone is about to unseat Unreal Engine overnight. It is that competition in game engines is moving beyond a pure performance arms race and into questions of geography, regulation, and industrial applicability. American solutions are already strong, and Chinese engine technology is advancing as well. If Europe wants to close that gap, local hosting and regulatory alignment are a credible place to start. What matters next is not the slogan, but when Immense Engine can show its first technical demos, outline its toolchain plans, and convince a first wave of developers to actually use it.