As an Indie Game Developer, De Jong founded Teotl Studios in 2009, where he developed the games The Ball, Unmechanical, and The Solus Project.
Now that the gaming industry is changing and adopting AI features and systems, it’s hard not to connect his departure to that, especially because he framed his leaving as coming to terms with where the industry is heading.
For the people who learned how to use Unreal Engine thanks to Sjoerd De Jong, this might be like the end of an era, but we don’t know what could happen next.