Former Overwatch game director and one-time face of the brand Jeff Kaplan left Blizzard Entertainment in 2021, after 19 years at the company. He’s been quietly working on another game since leaving, and recently spoke about his decision to leave Blizzard, the company he once thought he “would retire from.” Unsurprisingly, Kaplan has revealed that the catalyst for his departure from Blizzard and Overwatch was what many expected: corporate meddling and unchecked greed by parent company Activision Blizzard.
Kaplan appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast on Wednesday for a five-hour interview, during which he touched on his early career at Blizzard, his work on World of Warcraft, and the highs and lows of Overwatch. While Kaplan mostly displays a fondness for his time working at Blizzard, he identifies where things started to go wrong with Overwatch and what ultimately led to his resignation.
“The major derail was Overwatch League,” Kaplan said, referring to the now-shuttered esports league founded in 2017. As a result of Activision Blizzard over-selling Overwatch League, the “executive pressure was monumental,” he said.
“There was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League. Like, too much,” Kaplan recalled. “It got over-marketed to the people buying the teams. They went on this roadshow […] and they were pretty much selling the Brooklyn Bridge, that Overwatch League was going to be more popular than the NFL.”
After billionaire investors bought into the league, to the tune of $20 million, they started demanding new features in Overwatch that the development team wasn’t equipped to handle — at least not while they were trying to run Overwatch as a live game and grow it. Building Twitch integration, camera control for broadcasts, and uniforms for OWL teams strained the Overwatch team, Kaplan said.
“All your plans at that point kind of go out the window,” Kaplan said. “You’re not working on new world events, you’re not really even focused on Overwatch 2, you’re just kind of treading water.”
Kaplan called the Overwatch League “a house of cards” and “a great idea with the wrong instincts.”
“There was too much focus on let’s make lots of money really fast,” he said.
Eventually, Overwatch League’s owners realized that, no, Blizzard’s esports league wasn’t going to outshine the NFL.
“Originally, the business model was going to be that they were going to do in-person [Overwatch League] events, and there’s going to be big ticket sales and merch and all of that,” Kaplan recalled. “Really quickly, everybody learned we can’t do in-game events when we have a London team and a Shanghai team. How does this work? So that fell apart super quickly. The merch was good, but it wasn’t going to be making NFL-level money, whatever insanity anybody thought that was going to be.
“So everybody quickly defaulted back to, ‘Hey, didn’t Overwatch make $500 million just in the live game last year?’ What can we sell, and what can you give us? That pressure comes onto the team, and then the pressure to ship Overwatch 2, and then all the care and love that we had for the live game and the live service — let’s make events, new heroes, new maps — we’re losing all these resources.”
Kaplan said that in 2016 and 2017, he “felt very in control” as a game director, but that as the Overwatch League came to life, “it ended up being an albatross.”
While the pressure sounds intense, it wasn’t the Overwatch League’s failure — the league officially shut down in 2024 — that convinced him to give up his dream job. It was one meeting with an Activision Blizzard executive.
“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 […] ‘Overwatch has to make [redacted] in 2020, and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of [redacted],'” Kaplan recalled. “And then he says to me, ‘If it doesn’t do [redacted] dollars, we’re gonna lay off a thousand people, and that’s gonna be on you.’ And that was just the biggest fuck you moment I’ve had in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition.”
(Kaplan’s comments about specific figures are bleeped and redacted in the podcast due to a non-disclosure agreement.)
“I had believed I would never work any place but Blizzard,” Kaplan said. “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.”
Activision Blizzard’s chief financial officer at the time was longtime executive Dennis Durkin. He left the company in May 2021, one month after Kaplan.
Kaplan is now working on a new game, The Legend of California, which doesn’t look anything like Overwatch. Kaplan’s new studio, Kintsugiyama, describes its new venture as “a multiplayer, action-survival FPS set on the Island of California during the gold rush era.” Dreamhaven, the publisher founded by ex-Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime, is publishing the game.
