Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan was the public face of Overwatch before he left Activision-Blizzard in 2021. If you were interested in videogames between 2014 and 2021, it’s likely you’ll recognise his face. In a new interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, Kaplan details for the first time how and why he left Activision-Blizzard, and it’s not pretty.
The way Kaplan explains it, the good ship Overwatch started to buckle when unreasonable expectations were placed on the Overwatch League, a hugely hyped esports league founded in 2017 and closed in 2024.
“Where it got away from us is that there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much,” Kaplan said. “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.”
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“Originally the business model was going to be that they [Overwatch League] were going to do in-person events, and there’s going to be big ticket sales and merch and all of that. I think, really quickly, everybody learned we can’t do in-game events when we have a London team and a Shanghai team… like, how does this work? So that fell apart super quickly. The merch was good but it wasn’t going to be making NFL money, whatever insanity people thought that was going to be.
“So everybody [the investors] quickly defaulted back to, ‘hey, didn’t Overwatch make 500 million dollars just in the live game last year?’ What can we sell, and what can you give us? That pressure comes onto the [dev] team, and [add to that] the pressure to ship Overwatch 2, and then all the care and love that we had for the live game and the live service—like let’s make events, new heroes, new maps—we’re losing all these resources.”
“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—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 [redacted] in 2020, and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of [redacted]’ and then he says to me ‘if it doesn’t do [redacted] we’re going to lay off 1,000 people, and that’s going to be on you.’ And that was the biggest fuck you moment I’ve had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition.”
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