Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan was the public face of Overwatch before he leftActivision 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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It got to a point where commitments made to Overwatch League and its “billionaire investors” started to interfere with work on Overwatch itself, or at least, the part of it the public played. This included the development of Twitch integration, spectator camera control, as well as skins in the form of team uniforms. In other words, the money people kept promising features that soaked up development resources.
“And so all your plans [for Overwatch content] at that point kinda go out the window,” Kaplan said. “You’re not working on new world events, you’re not focused on Overwatch 2, you’re just treading water.”
Kaplan also describes how when Activision Blizzard wasn’t able to meet certain investor expectations with Overwatch League, the onus would be placed on the dev team to make good. “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 said.
Eventually it wasn’t just Activision and Blizzard who had financial stakes in Overwatch, but many other investors, all of whom started to express their opinion.
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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.”
Kaplan says that in 2016 and 2017, he felt in control of Overwatch and the direction of the game, alongside the product director Ray Gresko. “It felt like we were running Overwatch and we were very, very successful and doing a good job, and I think the fans were happy,” he said. Overwatch League, despite the good intentions behind it, “ended up being an albatross”.
In the end, after enduring the difficulties of managing Overwatch League expectations with development on the core game itself, Kaplan was sent over the edge by an exquisitely cruel meeting with the company’s then CFO.
“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.”
The redacted figures are due to a confidentiality agreement signed by Kaplan.
“As someone who’s worked on a lot of games, made a lot of games, you get in these meetings where they’re like ‘Fortnite has 1400 people working on it, so if we just hire 1400 people and make it free-to-play, we’ll make that money, right?’ I had believed that I would never work in any place but Blizzard, I loved it, it was a part of who I was, and I thought that I was a part of it. And I literally thought I’d retire from the place. I never thought the day would come, but that was it. Luckily for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there.”
Dennis Durkin was CFO of Activision Blizzard from 2019 to May 2021; Armin Zerza held the role from then until 2025. Kaplan’s departure was announced on April 20, 2021.
I’ve reached out to Activision Blizzard for comment.
After releasing in 2023 without many key advertised features, including a long-promised PvE mode, Overwatch 2 was eventually renamed Overwatch earlier this year.
