Jeff Kaplan, the former boss of the Overwatch team, has finally revealed why he left Blizzard after nearly 20 years with the company, pinning the blame on extreme financial pressures on the game to deliver for Activision Blizzard.
Kaplan announced his departure from Blizzard in August 2021, with the controversial Overwatch 2 still in development. Kaplan joined Blizzard in 2002 where he started as a designer on World of Warcraft, developing quests for the then upcoming MMORPG. He eventually was credited as a game director on WoW. In 2009, Kaplan spearheaded an unannounced project at Blizzard called Titan, an ambitious new MMO that was eventually canceled in 2014 after tens of millions of dollars was spent on its development.
Kaplan and members of the Titan team took ideas from the game and redesigned them into the team-based hero shooter now known as Overwatch, which went on to become incredibly successful. Now, five years after he left, Kaplan has returned to the public eye to announce his new game, The Legend of California, and to tell his side of the story. In a sweeping interview with Lex Fridman, Kaplan discussed his career so far, and as part of that opened up on why he left Blizzard.
Here's my conversation with Jeff Kaplan, a legendary Blizzard game designer of World of Warcraft and Overwatch, which are two of the biggest, most influential games ever made. Jeff is one of the most genuine & awesome human beings I've ever met: kind, thoughtful, hilarious, and… pic.twitter.com/kw14nET8SQ
— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) March 11, 2026
He pointed to the Overwatch League, Overwatch’s dedicated esports series that revolved around city-based teams mirroring traditional sports leagues, as being “the major derail.” According to Kaplan, who believed in Overwatch League and helped pitch it, it was oversold to partners who then applied an increased pressure on the Overwatch team to deliver not just in-game support for the League in terms of team skins, esports spectator camera control, and Twitch integration, but pressure to generate more revenue.
"Where it got away from us was, there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much so," Kaplan said. "And then 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. We got a bunch of billionaire investors in these teams.”
Commitments made for Overwatch League pulled resources away from what Kaplan actually wanted to do with Overwatch, which was to build on the game itself with new events and heroes.
"And so all of your plans at that point kinda go out the window," Kaplan explained. "You're not going to work on new world events, you're not really even focused on Overwatch 2, you're just treading water. There was a lot of talk of like, ‘Oh god, the deal didn’t go well and we’ve got to do ‘make goods’ to make the deal better for them.’ I’m like, ‘Just give them some money back.’ If the deal isn’t what people wanted, putting it on us, the Overwatch team, to support this beast…
“It was a great idea that the wrong instincts and… 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 dragged into it.”
The financial reality then kicked in, Kaplan said. “Now we didn’t just have executives at Activision and Blizzard who cared about the bottom line of Overwatch. We had all these people who basically invested in the game, and then they started to express their opinions.”
After it became clear Overwatch League wasn’t going to deliver NFL money, “Everybody quickly defaulted back to, ‘Hey, didn’t Overwatch make like $500 million just in the live game last year? What can we sell and what can you give us?’ That pressure comes onto the team. And then the pressure to ship Overwatch 2, and all care and love that we had for the live game, let’s just make events and new heroes and new maps, we’re losing all these resources.”
Kaplan said he believed in Overwatch 2, saying the Overwatch 2 out now is not the PvE version that Blizzard had announced (Blizzard has since reverted the Overwatch 2 name to, simply, Overwatch). Overwatch 2 and Overwatch League eventually became an “albatross,” Kaplan said, ruining what he felt was very much a good thing. “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.
Kaplan then revealed a meeting with Activision’s then Chief Financial Officer which, as he described it, “was the biggest f*** you moment I had in my career.”
(The dollar amounts are redacted to prevent Kaplan from breaking a non-disclosure agreement, according to the interview tape.)
"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] dollars, we're going to lay off 1,000 people, and that's going to be on you.' And that was just the biggest f*** you moment I had in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition."
Kaplan went on to say he thought he’d retire at Blizzard. But that meeting was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and he left the company a year later.
"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 1,400 people working on it, if you just hire 1,400 people and make it free-to-play, we'll make that money, right?' I had believed I would never work any place but Blizzard. 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."
Activision Blizzard’s then CFO was Dennis Durkin, who left in May 2021. IGN has asked Activision for comment.
Photo by James Sheppard/Edge Magazine/Future via Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
📰 Original Source:IGN
✍️ Author: Wesley Yin-Poole
