Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan was the public face of Overwatch earlier than he leftActivision Blizzard in 2021. If you had been in video video games between 2014 and 2021, it is doubtless you’ll acknowledge his face. In a brand new interview on the Lex Fridman podcastKaplan particulars for the first time how and why he left Activision Blizzard, and it is not fairly.
The manner Kaplan explains it, the good ship Overwatch began to buckle when unreasonable expectations had been positioned on the Overwatch League, a vastly hyped esports league based in 2017 and closed in 2024.
“Where it got away from us is that there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much,” Kaplan mentioned. “It got overmarketed to the people buying the teams. They went on this roadshow where they had a deck—and you can put anything in a deck, and sell anything—and they were pretty much selling the Brooklyn Bridge, that Overwatch League was going to be more popular than the NFL.”
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It obtained to a degree the place commitments made to the Overwatch League and its “billionaire investors” began to intrude with work on Overwatch itself, or not less than, the a part of it the public performed. This included the improvement of Twitch integration, spectator digital camera management, in addition to skins in the type of crew uniforms. In different phrases, the cash folks saved promising options that soaked up improvement assets.
“And so all your plans [for Overwatch content] at that point kinda go out the window,” Kaplan mentioned. “You’re not working on new world events, you’re not focused on Overwatch 2, you’re just treading water.”
Kaplan additionally describes how when Activision Blizzard wasn’t in a position to meet sure investor expectations with Overwatch League, the onus can be positioned on the dev crew to do good. “I don’t know how to phrase this in a way that’s not damning, but there was too much focus on ‘let’s make lots of money really fast’ and a lot of people got drawn into it,” Kaplan mentioned.
Eventually it wasn’t simply Activision and Blizzard who had monetary stakes in Overwatch, however many different buyers, all of whom began to specific their opinion.
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“Originally the business model was going to be that they [Overwatch League] were going to do in-person events, and there’s going to be big ticket sales and merch and all of that. I think, really quickly, everyone learned we can’t do in-game events when we have a London team and a Shanghai team… like, how does this work? So that fell apart super quickly. The merch was good but it wasn’t going to be making NFL money, whatever insanity people thought that was going to be.
“So everyone [the investors] rapidly defaulted again to, ‘hey, did not Overwatch make 500 million {dollars} simply in the stay sport final yr?’ What can we promote, and what can you give us? That stress comes onto the [dev] crew, and [add to that] the stress to ship Overwatch 2, after which all the care and love that we had for the stay sport and the stay service—like let’s make occasions, new heroes, new maps—we’re shedding all these assets.”
Kaplan says that in 2016 and 2017, he felt in control of Overwatch and the direction of the game, alongside product director Ray Gresko. “It felt like we had been working Overwatch and we had been very, very profitable and doing a great job, and I believe the followers had been pleased,” he said. Overwatch League, despite the good intentions behind it, “ended up being an albatross.”
In the finish, after enduring the difficulties of managing Overwatch League expectations with improvement on the core sport itself, Kaplan was despatched over the edge by an exquisitely merciless assembly with the firm’s then CFO.
“What ultimately broke me and my Blizzard career was I got called into the CFO’s office and he sits me down and he says—he gives me a date which at the time was 2020 and was going to slip to 2021, but at the time it was 2020—and he said: ‘Overwatch has to make [redacted] in 2020, and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of [redacted]’and then he says to me ‘if it doesn’t do [redacted] we’re going to lay off 1,000 people, and that’s going to be on you.’ And that was the biggest fuck you moment I’ve had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition.”
The redacted figures are as a consequence of a confidentiality settlement signed by Kaplan.
“As someone who’s worked on a lot of games, made a lot of games, you get in these meetings where they’re like ‘Fortnite has 1400 people working on it, so if we just hire 1400 people and make it free-to-play, we’ll make that money, right?’ I had believed that I would never work anywhere but Blizzard, I loved it, it was a part of who I was, and I thought that I was a part of it. And I literally thought I’d retire from the place. I never thought the day would come, but that was it. Luckily for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there.”
Dennis Durkin was CFO of Activision Blizzard from 2019 to May 2021; Armin Zerza held the position from then till 2025. Kaplan’s departure was introduced on April 20, 2021.
I’ve reached out to Activision Blizzard for remark.
After releasing in 2023 with out many key marketed options, together with a long-promised PvE mode, Overwatch 2 was ultimately renamed Overwatch earlier this yr.
