After leaving Epic Games last month, its former 'Unreal evangelist' is now building his own game engine Sjoerd De Jong aims to combat game development "stagnation" he says has emerged from Epic and Unity market dominance. In June, Sjoerd De Jong—an Unreal Engine modder and map creator turned full-time specialist at Epic Games—announced that he was leaving the company after 12 years as a senior director and Unreal Engine "lead evangelist." In a cryptic departure message, he said the games industry was at a "pivotal point," and he's aiming to "work out how to adapt and excel" at addressing the changing needs of videogame development. Shortly before De Jong left the company, Epic revealed its focus for Unreal Engine's future, envisioning a "central role" for "LLMs, generative AI models, and tools like Claude and Codex." De Jong is skeptical that "those existing engines or existing [development] tools, that were made for humans over the years, are able to really serve [agentic AI]." While Immens is being built to offer a more accommodating development platform for agentic AI to interface with, De Jong said "it's not an 'AI engine'"—it's a "proper game engine that happens to be friendly to an AI architecture." Developers, he said, are still going to have to do the developing: "We don't want [users to] press a button and generate a game, and then release it alongside the other five million games people have made that way." 2026 games: All the upcoming games Best PC games: Our all-time favorites Free PC games: Freebie fest Best FPS games: Finest gunplay Best RPGs: Grand adventures Best co-op games: Better together Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.
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PC Gamer