The former head of the Overwatch team, Jeff Kaplan, has revealed why he left Blizzard after nearly two decades with the company.
Jeff Kaplan announced his departure from Blizzard Entertainment back in August 2021, with Overwatch 2 still in development. Fans questioned the video game designer’s choice, considering Kaplan joined Blizzard in 2002 as a quest designer for the next great MMORPG, World of Warcraft. In 2009, Kaplan was inserted as project head of an unannounced project at Blizzard called Titan. This was a new MMO that was dead before its arrival (it was cancelled) in 2014. Members of the team that helped develop Titan were reformed into a new team that brought Overwatch to launch in 2016.
With such a storied history with Blizzard, it was out of place for Kaplan to leave Blizzard with Overwatch 2 unreleased, so he explained his departure years ago in a new interview on the Lex Fridman podcast. Kaplan details for the first time how and why he left Activision Blizzard, while also announcing his new project, The Legend of California.
Kaplan explains in the interview that the struggles Blizzard faced were of their own making with Overwatch, with unreasonable expectations placed on the then-budding Overwatch League that started in 2017. Kaplan says, “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,” Kaplan referred to this pressure as “the major derail,” the league was oversold to investors and that pressure kept building and eventually got in the way of actual game development.
Commitments were made to investors that were aimed at generating more revenue, not just supporting the League through team skins and seamless Twitch streaming. Those commitments diverted resources away from Overwatch’s development. Kaplan said, “So all of your plans at that point kind of go out the window.” He added: “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 drawn into it.”
Kaplan was eventually brought to a boiling point when he met with Activision’s then Chief Financial Officer, whom he described as “the biggest f*** you moment I had in my career.” Kaplan revealed that he left the company because of the nature of the meeting. Kaplan explained he was told then if Overwatch didn’t make a certain amount of revenue, the CFO would “lay off 1,000 people, and that’s going to be on you.” According to LinkedIn, the acting CFO of Activision Blizzard at the time was Dennis Durkin.
Kaplan signed off by saying he thought he was going to retire at Blizzard, saying, “I loved it. It was a part of who I was. And I thought I was a part of it. And I literally thought I would retire from the place. I never thought the day would come. But that was it. We’re done here. Luckily for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there.”
Kaplan’s new title is an indie multiplayer action-survival FPS that lets players craft, gather, hunt, fight, and build across thriving communities. The new title is called The Legend of California, and its Steam page is up now.
