If you were an Overwatch fan back in the day, you were probably familiar with Jeff from the Overwatch team, as he would introduce himself when talking to the player base. Jeff Kaplan was the face of Overwatch from launch until 2021, when he left the game and Blizzard behind.
Now, Kaplan has shed some light on his departure and some of the behind-the-scenes issues at the time. Kaplan says a lot of that was due to the Overwatch League, or more specifically, the unrealistic expectations from investors, which affected the workload of the development team.
Jeff Kaplan talks about his departure from Blizzard
As reported by PC Gamer, Kaplan discussed this on the Lex Fridman Podcast. Here he explained the expectations placed on the developers – and how one manager threatened to lay off 1,000 employees if the team didn't meet their goals.
He starts by talking about the Overwatch League. “It was over-marketed to the people who bought the teams,” he says. “They went on this road show where they had a deck — and you can put anything in a deck and sell anything — and they pretty much sold the Brooklyn Bridge, that the Overwatch League was going to be more popular than the NFL.”
Of course, that never came to fruition. However, the unrealistic expectations did not end there. Kaplan says trying to keep the Overwatch League afloat for the billionaire investors took resources away from ongoing development, including work on Overwatch 2. This culminated in a meeting with Blizzard's then-CFO, Dennis Durkin, about Overwatch's finances.
“What ultimately broke me and my Blizzard career was I was called into the CFO's office and he sits me down and he says — he gives me a date that at the time was 2020 and was going to slide to 2021, but at the time it was 2020 — and he said, 'Overwatch has to do [redacted] in 2020, and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of [redacted]',” Kaplan recounts. “Then he tells me, 'If it doesn't [redacted] we will lay off 1,000 people, and it will be up to you.' And that was the biggest fucking moment I've had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that state.”
That CFO left shortly after Kaplan, so hopefully the current dev team doesn't suffer such ultimatums. In any case, Overwatch seems to be in much better shape now, with a recent update getting everything back on track, giving player numbers a boost.
- Released
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24 May 2016
- ESRB
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T for Teen: Blood, Tobacco Use, Violence (Online Interactions Not Rated)
- Engine
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Proprietary
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer
- Cross-platform play
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ps5, xbox, pc
- Cross Save
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yes
