Jeff Kaplan was a 19-year veteran of Blizzard when he suddenly left the company in 2021. He was the director on Overwatch, the company’s most successful new franchise in years, and end up departing two years before the sequel shipped. Almost five years later, he’s finally revealed why he left. The answer has to do with corporate mismanagement and the increasing pressure to deliver huge profits.
The original Overwatch launched in 2016 alongside an explosion in hype around esports. Kaplan said that while his desire was to keep the game’s post-launch focus on introducing new world events and updates, a push by Activision Blizzard into competitive gaming diverted the team’s time and resources.
“Where it got away from us is that there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much,” Kaplan said in a new interview with Lex Fridman. “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.”
The eventual establishment of the Overwatch League, a franchise system where teams sold for millions of dollars each, ended up being a “house of cards” that the company couldn’t deliver on. Activision Blizzard had reportedly projected $125 million in revenue from the venture to start, money that never materialized before the league was eventually shut down in 2023.
When the league couldn’t deliver the profits to team owners that the company had promised, there became mounting pressure to use in-game microtransactions to help boost esports revenues. The result was resources that could have been put into new content and keeping the game dynamic being poured into esports monetization opportunities instead.
“My parents always said the road to hell is paved with good intentions, that was the Overwatch League and it ended up being an albatross,” Kaplan said.
His team at Overwatch was also tasked with delivering a sequel. Unlike the Overwatch 2 that eventually shipped in 2023, the original vision for the game was to have a big PVE push that would live alongside the ongoing competitive PVP portion of the game. But with the success of the original game, which made $1 billion in revenue in its first year, and the rise of live service juggernauts like Fortnite, there was pressure to deliver ever higher profits.
“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 [bleep] in 2020, and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of [bleep]’ and then he says to me ‘if it doesn’t do [bleep] we’re going to lay off 1,000 people, and that’s going to be on you,’” Kaplan said (the numbers were censored per his NDA. “And that was the biggest fuck you moment I’ve had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition.”
Kaplan never mentions the executive by name. Activision Blizzard’s CFO at the time was Dennis Durkin. He ended up departing the company in early 2021, just a couple months after Kaplan. The experience of leaving Blizzard “broke me,” the Overwatch director said. He added that he wished game developers would know their value more and not hand over the “golden goose to people who don’t deserve it.”
“Separating from Blizzard was one of the most painful things,” he said. “And I was very sad when I resigned and I didn’t realize how broken I was until recently like the mourning, grieving I had gone through.”
