Guerrilla Games Co-Founder Builds European Rival to Unreal

A Guerrilla Games co-founder — the studio behind Killzone and Horizon — is leading development of a new high-performance engine pitched as a European alternative to Unreal Engine 5 and Unity. The project, reportedly going by "Immressive Engine," is targeting studios that want out of licensing terms and royalty structures from US-headquartered engine vendors. There's no firm release date and almost no demo material, but the founder pedigree is doing the heavy lifting on credibility for now. The wider pattern is harder to ignore: Godot's market share has been climbing in recent industry surveys, Unity is still bleeding goodwill from the 2023 runtime fee scar, and another European-led engine effort surfacing this year suggests the assumption that AAA budgets must live inside UE5 is starting to look soft.