Europe May Soon Get a Non-U.S. Alternative to Unreal Engine

The Dutch co-creator of a legendary 90s platformer wants to build Europe's answer to Unreal Engine — and the geopolitical moment for such a project has never been better.

Arjan Brussee, who co-founded Guerrilla Games (the studio behind Horizon: Zero Dawn) and spent years working at Epic Games itself, appeared on the Dutch tech podcast De Technoloog this week to announce his vision for the "Immense Engine" — a general-purpose 3D engine that would be fully European-hosted, built by Europeans, and compliant with European regulations.

"No one is currently making an engine that is fully European-hosted, built by Europeans, and complies with European rules and guidelines," Brussee said. He also made clear the engine would go beyond gaming: "Creating usable 3D worlds is becoming increasingly important, certainly for purposes other than just gaming."

## Why This Matters Now

Unreal Engine isn't just a game engine anymore. It's infrastructure. It powers Fortnite, yes, but also Hollywood productions like The Mandalorian, architectural visualization, military simulation, automotive design, and increasingly, enterprise training and education. Epic Games claims over 7.5 million developers use Unreal Engine, and its influence extends far beyond entertainment.

That concentration of power in a single American company has been a growing concern in Europe for years, but two recent shifts have made the issue urgent:

**1. The AI regulation gap.** The EU's AI Act, which takes full effect in stages through 2026-2027, imposes strict requirements on AI systems that don't exist in U.S. law. Unreal Engine 5.4+ incorporates AI-driven features (procedural generation, ML-based upscaling, AI-assisted animation). A U.S.-controlled engine may not prioritize EU compliance, and European companies using it could face regulatory exposure.

**2. The sovereignty push.** Europe's strategic autonomy agenda has accelerated dramatically. France is migrating government systems from Windows to Linux. The EU is funding its own semiconductor manufacturing. Defense procurement increasingly favors domestic suppliers. A European 3D engine fits squarely into this trend.

The timing is also notable because Epic Games itself is in transition. The company's legal battles with Apple and Google over app store fees, combined with significant layoffs and restructuring, have created uncertainty about Unreal Engine's long-term development roadmap. For European studios and enterprises, that uncertainty is a feature, not a bug — it makes the case for an alternative.

## The Credibility Question

If anyone can credibly propose a European Unreal Engine competitor, it's Brussee. His career spans both sides of the equation: he co-founded Guerrilla Games, which built its own proprietary engine (Decima) for the Horizon series, and then spent years at Epic Games working on the technology he's now proposing to compete with.

He also created Jazz Jackrabbit in the 1990s — a cultural touchstone for European game development that proved Dutch studios could produce globally competitive titles.

But building a game engine is one of the hardest software engineering challenges that exists. Unity spent over a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars to reach its current position. CryEngine, made by Germany's Crytek, never achieved mainstream adoption despite impressive technical capabilities. And Amazon's Lumberyard (now Open 3D Engine) struggled for years despite nearly unlimited resources.

The track record for Unreal Engine competitors is not encouraging.

## The AI Angle — And Why It's Both a Strength and a Risk

Brussee's vision for Immense Engine reportedly incorporates AI heavily — and this is where the project becomes both promising and concerning.

AI-assisted engine development could dramatically accelerate the timeline for reaching feature parity with Unreal Engine. Procedural world generation, AI-driven animation, natural language scene creation, and automated testing could allow a smaller team to produce capabilities that would traditionally require a thousand engineers.

But it also creates a paradox: the engine is supposed to be European and compliant with EU AI regulations, yet building it with AI introduces precisely the regulatory complexity those rules are designed to address. If the engine's AI features fall under the AI Act's "high-risk" classification (which they well might, given applications in military simulation, infrastructure, and education), Brussee's team will need to navigate compliance requirements that Epic Games — operating from the U.S. — doesn't face.

This could be an advantage (built-in compliance as a differentiator) or a millstone (compliance slowing development while Unreal Engine iterates freely). It depends on execution.

## The Market Opportunity

The total addressable market for a European Unreal Engine alternative extends well beyond gaming:

- **European game studios** who want to reduce dependence on American infrastructure - **European defense ministries** who need simulation tools that comply with EU data sovereignty rules - **Architecture and construction firms** who need BIM-integrated 3D visualization under EU standards - **Automotive manufacturers** (Volkswagen, BMW, Stellantis) who already use real-time 3D for design and need GDPR-compliant tools - **Broadcasters and film studios** who want an alternative to Epic's Hollywood push - **Smart city and urban planning** applications that involve public data and EU regulatory requirements

That's not a niche market. It's a multi-billion-euro opportunity that currently sends most of its revenue to Cary, North Carolina.

## What This Means For You

**If you're a game developer in Europe**, this is potentially the most significant infrastructure project in your industry since Unity went public. Even if Immense Engine fails to reach feature parity with Unreal, its existence will force Epic to take European concerns more seriously — and that could mean better licensing terms, more EU-compliant features, and actual competition in a market that's been a duopoly for years.

**If you're a developer outside Europe**, watch this project closely. A successful European engine would likely be open-source or at least source-available (European tech sovereignty projects tend to favor open models), which could create a viable free alternative to Unreal's increasingly restrictive licensing terms.

**If you're an investor**, the question isn't whether Brussee can build the engine — he probably can, at least to a usable MVP. The question is whether he can build the ecosystem. Unreal Engine's real moat isn't the code; it's the 7.5 million developers, the marketplace of assets, the educational infrastructure, and the community. Replicating that takes a decade and billions in investment. The EU may be willing to fund that. They're certainly talking about it.

**If you work in 3D visualization, simulation, or digital twins**, a European engine with built-in AI Act compliance could save you significant legal and engineering overhead. Start tracking this project now — even early access could give you a head start on competitors still manually checking their Unreal integrations against evolving EU rules.

**For everyone else**, this is a signal that the tech sovereignty movement is moving from policy papers into actual products. The French government switching from Windows to Linux. European cloud providers winning government contracts. And now, potentially, a European game engine. The era of defaulting to American tech infrastructure is ending — not because American products are worse, but because the rest of the world is deciding that dependence is a vulnerability.