It has been almost five whole years since former Overwatch director and co-creator Jeff Kaplan announced his departure from Blizzard. In a new interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, as caught by PCGamer, he has revealed some of his thoughts about the almost two decades he spent at the company, and why he left to begin with.
While a variety of factors contributed to his decision to leave, a major one was how the now-defunct esports league for Overwatch, dubbed Overwatch League, had massive expectations placed on it. He noted that its potential success got “overmarketed” to the people who would be paying to field teams for the event, with some claiming that Overwatch League would end up becoming even bigger than the NFL.
This led to a lot of commitments being made, which in turn would get “billionaire investors” involved, interfering with the ongoing development work on Overwatch. “And so all your plans [for Overwatch content] at that point kinda go out the window,” he said. “You’re not working on new world events, you’re not focused on Overwatch 2, you’re just treading water.” Ultimately, the entirety of the Overwatch League essentially became an attempt to “let’s make lots of money really fast,” according to Kaplan.
“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,” he continued. “I think, really quickly, everybody 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 everybody [the investors] quickly defaulted back to, ‘hey, didn’t Overwatch make 500 million dollars just in the live game last year?’ What can we sell, and what can you give us? That pressure comes onto the [dev] team, and [add to that] the pressure to ship Overwatch 2, and then all the care and love that we had for the live game and the live service—like let’s make events, new heroes, new maps—we’re losing all these resources.”
Kaplan noted that he, along with product director Ray Gresko, felt more in control of Overwatch as a whole in its early years, before Overwatch League happened, which he said “ended up being an albatross.” Eventually, however, Kaplan would be driven to resign from the company after one particular meeting with the at-the-time CFO (chief financial officer) of Activision Blizzard. In this meeting, he was given specific revenue targets for Overwatch, along with targets for ongoing revenue. Failure to meet these targets would result in lay-offs for 1,000 employees.
“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 f*** you moment I’ve had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition.”
“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 in any place 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.”
While Kaplan would leave the company in 2021, Overwatch 2 would eventually come out as a free-to-play game in its Early Access form in 2022, before getting an official launch in 2023. The free-to-play competitive hero shooter is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. More recently, Blizzard decided to remove the “2” from the title and just call it Overwatch.
