Sjoerd De Jong, the Dutch Belgian developer known across the Unreal community as Hourences, has left Epic Games after 12 years building the Unreal Engine developer ecosystem. He announced the departure on LinkedIn, saying his last week at the company had passed and that 27 years of working with Unreal Engine had come to a natural close. De Jong was one of the most visible faces of Unreal in Europe and the product owner behind the Epic Developer Community platform that serves more than 200,000 developers a month.

Who is Sjoerd De Jong?

De Jong started modding the original Unreal at age 15 and turned that hobby into a 27 year career in games. He built custom maps and mods, was contracted by Epic to create levels for Unreal Tournament 2004, and worked as an environment artist and level designer on titles at Guerrilla Games and Starbreeze. He later founded the indie studio Teotl Studios, which shipped The Ball and The Solus Project, before joining Epic full time to become the public face of Unreal Engine across the northern half of Europe during the Unreal Engine 4 era.

What did he do at Epic Games?

In his final years he shifted from evangelism into product leadership. He envisioned and built the Epic Developer Community website, a unified hub pulling together forums, documentation, tutorials, courses, and developer profiles at a scale of 200,000 monthly users and more than 100 million monthly page views. He led the teams responsible for Unreal Engine documentation, sample projects, tech talks, and livestreams, handled the 2024 relaunch of the main Unreal Engine site, and helped course correct the Fab asset marketplace after its rocky launch. In short, if you learned Unreal Engine from official channels, you used something De Jong helped shape.

Why does his departure matter?

De Jong framed his exit around a belief that the games industry has reached a pivotal point. He said change has always been relentless in games, but that the present moment feels like the close of one era and the start of another, language that many read as a nod to the disruption generative AI is bringing to game development. When a person who spent a decade teaching the world how to use the dominant game engine says the ground is shifting, studios and solo developers tend to listen. His departure is one data point in a wider pattern of veteran developers reassessing where the craft is heading.

What happens to the Unreal developer community?

Epic Developer Community and the engine documentation do not vanish because one leader leaves, but institutional knowledge is hard to replace. The relationships De Jong built with more than 500 studios across Europe and his long memory of how the platform grew are the kind of soft infrastructure that rarely shows up on an org chart. For developers, the practical question is whether Epic keeps investing in the learning resources and community channels he championed, or whether the focus drifts toward Fortnite and the creator economy. For De Jong, the next move is open, and he has signaled interest in contract work rather than another decade inside a single company.

What does this say about the broader industry?

The games business has been turbulent, with layoffs, studio closures, and hard questions about AI tooling all landing at once. A respected insider stepping away and openly calling the moment pivotal reads as a temperature check on the whole field. It does not mean Unreal Engine is in trouble, since the engine powers an enormous share of modern games and film production. It does mean that even the people closest to the tooling sense that the assumptions of the last decade are being rewritten, and that is worth paying attention to whether you build games or just play them.

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