Former Unreal Engine ‘lead evangelist’ Sjoerd De Jong leaves Epic Games, says the industry is reaching a ‘pivotal’ moment that he must ‘come to terms with’

Sjoerd De Jong, an Unreal Engine expert from its early days who joined Epic Games full-time in 2014—first as “lead evangelist” and most recently as the senior director of an unannounced project—has left the company, he revealed last week in a LinkedIn post.

“After 27 years of Unreal Engine, and 12 years at Epic Games and Unreal Engine I have decided to move on. Last week was my last week at Epic,” De Jong wrote. “This has been an awesome ride that has been truly life changing in so many ways. I didn’t have an easy childhood or youth and things weren’t going anywhere, but all of that changed entirely when I discovered Unreal Engine.”

De Jong’s history with Unreal goes back to when he was 15 years old, modding the original 1998 FPS. He was such a prominent map creator he was directly approached by Epic to work on Unreal Tournament 2004, where he designed levels like DM-Rankin and ONS-Torlan, the former of which was the most-played UT2004 map of all time according to server stats cataloged on the Unreal wiki. The portfolio on his website offers a bird’s-eye overview of his other work on games like Killzone and The Ball.

While he worked at a variety of studios over the years, including Starbreeze and his own indie company, Teotl Studios, Unreal Engine has long been a passion and specialty—so much so that Epic Games dubbed De Jong the engine’s “lead evangelist” when it hired him in 2014.

In the recent LinkedIn post, he talked about how much working with the engine’s various incarnations at Epic changed his life: “Dozens of countries visited, hundreds of studios visited, hundreds of talks presented, tens of thousands of people met, and millions of developers supported every year.”

As for why he’s decided to leave Epic now, De Jong wrote that “this era has come to a close, and it is time to move forward.”

“The games industry has always been an industry where change is relentless and inevitable, but it feels like we are reaching a pivotal point now and a potent mix of things,” he wrote.

Epic recently unveiled its plans for Unreal Engine 6, which will merge Unreal Engine 5 and Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and is focused on “enabling content, code, and economies to become portable and interoperable across games, ecosystems, and engines through open standards,” as well as generative AI integration.

Moving forward, De Jong says it would be strategic for him to “come to terms with where [the industry] is heading and to work out how to adapt and excel at solving the challenges and opportunities that we face.”