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\u2019s most successful new franchise in years, and end up departing two years before the sequel shipped. Almost five years later, he\u2019s finally revealed why he left. The answer has to do with corporate mismanagement and the increasing pressure to deliver huge profits.<\/p>\n
The original Overwatch launched in 2016 alongside an explosion in hype around esports. Kaplan said that while his desire was to keep the game\u2019s post-launch focus on introducing new world events and updates, a push by Activision Blizzard into competitive gaming diverted the team\u2019s time and resources.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhere it got away from us is that there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much,\u201d Kaplan said in a new interview with Lex Fridman<\/a>. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The eventual establishment of the Overwatch League, a franchise system where teams sold for millions of dollars each, ended up being a \u201chouse of cards\u201d that the company couldn\u2019t deliver on. Activision Blizzard had reportedly projected<\/a> $125 million in revenue from the venture to start, money that never materialized before the league was eventually shut down in 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n When the league couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cMy parents always said the road to hell is paved with good intentions, that was the Overwatch League and it ended up being an albatross,\u201d Kaplan said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat ultimately broke me and my Blizzard career was I got called into the CFO\u2019s 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, \u2018Overwatch has to make [bleep] in 2020, and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of [bleep]\u2019 and then he says to me \u2018if it doesn\u2019t do [bleep] we\u2019re going to lay off 1,000 people, and that\u2019s going to be on you,’\u201d Kaplan said (the numbers were censored per his NDA. \u201cAnd that was the biggest fuck you moment I\u2019ve had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition.\u201d<\/p>\n Kaplan never mentions the executive by name. Activision Blizzard\u2019s CFO at the time was Dennis Durkin. He ended up departing the company in early 2021, just a couple months after Kaplan.\u00a0The experience of leaving Blizzard \u201cbroke me,\u201d the Overwatch director said. He added that he wished game developers would know their value more and not hand over the \u201cgolden goose to people who don\u2019t deserve it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSeparating from Blizzard was one of the most painful things,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I was very sad when I resigned and I didn\u2019t realize how broken I was until recently like the mourning, grieving I had gone through.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jeff Kaplan was a 19-year veteran of Blizzard when he suddenly left the company in 2021. He was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":518725,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[50112,211042,74],"class_list":["post-518724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-blizzard","tag-overwatch","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518724\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/518725"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}