The former director of Overwatch and a veteran of the gaming industry, Jeff Kaplan, recently revealed the reasons behind his departure from Blizzard during an in-depth interview. In it, Kaplan explains how high expectations surrounding esports and sequel development, alongside intense demands from C-suite executives that “broke him”.
In a podcast episode with Lex Friedman (which runs over five hours), Kaplan goes in-depth on his time at Blizzard, running up to the events leading to his sudden departure in 2021, when Overwatch 2 was still in development.
The failure of Overwatch League
Following the massive success of Overwatch in 2016, Blizzard launched Overwatch League in 2018 during an era where esports were becoming more popular than ever before and attracted big investor attention. While Kaplan explains his belief in the project at the beginning, the cracks began to appear when Overwatch League was oversold to investors.
“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.”
“There was too much focus on ‘let’s make lots of money really fast’.”
Jeff Kaplan on Overwatch League’s failure
Following billionaire investments in teams came an exclusive deal with Twitch for the streaming rights to the League, which presented “huge technical challenges” for the development team, including spectator cameras and skins for all the League’s teams, which took valuable time and resources away from support for the game and development of a sequel.
“It was a great idea that had the wrong instincts. 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 dragged into it.”
While Overwatch League never reached the heights Blizzard seemed to expect, the pressures of financial success remained heavy on the development team, especially surrounding the creation of Overwatch 2. Kaplan explained:
“So everybody defaulted back to: ‘Hey, didn’t Overwatch make like $500 million just in the live game last year? What can we sell, what can you give us?’ That pressure comes onto the team, and then the pressure to ship Overwatch 2, and all care and love that we had for the live game and the live service– let’s just make events, and new heroes, and new maps–we’re losing all these resources.”
Profit demands from C-Suite executives
After some discussion about the development of Overwatch 2, primarily the PvE versus PvP elements of the game that Kaplan had hoped to implement, Kaplan dives into what “broke him” at Blizzard.
“That was just the biggest ‘f*ck you’ moment I had in my career.”
Jeff Kaplan, former Overwatch director
“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’. That was just the biggest ‘f*ck you’ moment I had in my career.”
(Note: The bleeps were added into the audio to adhere to Kaplan’s confidentiality agreement with the company.)
Continuing on his feelings surrounding his departure, Kaplan stated, “I had believed I would never work any place but Blizzard. I loved it. It was a part of who I was, and I felt I was a part of it. And I literally thought I would retire from the place. I never thought the day would come. And that was it, I was like, ‘we’re done here’.”
“Luckily for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there.”
The CFO at the time, according to LinkedIn, was Dennis Durkin, who left the company shortly after Kaplan. Former Blizzard president Mike Ybarra wrote on social media following the release of the podcast to state that the CFO Kaplan is referring to is not Durkin, though he didn’t clarify on who Kaplan may be referring to.
To finish off his thoughts surrounding his departure, Kaplan warned creatives at game developers against giving too much to executives and companies that don’t value them.
“I wish developers would understand their own value more, and stop handing the golden goose to people who don’t deserve it.”
It’s disappointing to hear that, behind the scenes, corporate greed derailed legendary developers from creating games they were passionate about, especially at a studio as iconic as Blizzard.
Thankfully, Kaplan still has more in the tank, as he revealed on the podcast his new indie game studio, named Kintsugiyama, as well as its first title, The Legend of California. The game is an action-survival FPS, according to its new Steam page, “set on the mythical Island of California during the gold rush era.” Players can wishlist it now, with an early access release date set for sometime this year.
