Overwatch Director Jeff Kaplan Opens Up About His Departure from Blizzard: ‘The Emphasis on Quick Profits Was Overwhelming’

Jeff Kaplan, a veteran of Blizzard for 19 years, made a surprising exit from the company in 2021. As the director of Overwatch, Blizzard’s most successful new franchise in years, he left just two years before the sequel was set to launch. Nearly five years later, Kaplan has opened up about the reasons behind his departure, citing corporate mismanagement and escalating pressure to generate substantial profits.

The original Overwatch debuted in 2016, coinciding with a surge in excitement around esports. Kaplan expressed that while he aimed to keep the game focused on new world events and updates post-launch, Activision Blizzard’s push into competitive gaming diverted the team’s attention and resources.

“Where it got away from us is that there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much,” Kaplan shared in a recent interview. “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.”

The creation of the Overwatch League, a franchise system where teams were sold for millions, turned into a “house of cards” that the company struggled to support. Activision Blizzard had initially projected $125 million in revenue from the league, a figure that never materialized before the league was ultimately shut down in 2023.

As the league failed to deliver the promised profits to team owners, pressure mounted to leverage in-game microtransactions to boost esports revenues. This shift meant that resources that could have been dedicated to new content and keeping the game fresh were instead funneled into monetizing esports.

“My parents always said the road to hell is paved with good intentions, that was the Overwatch League and it ended up being an albatross,” Kaplan remarked.

His team was also responsible for developing a sequel. The original vision for Overwatch 2 included a significant PVE component alongside the ongoing competitive PVP aspect. However, with the original game’s success—generating $1 billion in its first year—and the rise of live service giants like Fortnite, there was immense pressure to achieve even greater profits.

“What ultimately broke me and my Blizzard career was I got called into the CFO’s office and he sits me down and 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 [bleep] in 2020, and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of [bleep]’ and then he says to me ‘if it doesn’t do [bleep] we’re going to lay off 1,000 people, and that’s going to be on you,’” Kaplan recounted, with the specific figures omitted due to his NDA. “And that was the biggest shock moment I’ve had in my career; it felt surreal to be in that situation.”

Kaplan did not name the executive involved, but at the time, Activision Blizzard’s CFO was Dennis Durkin, who also left the company shortly after Kaplan. The experience of leaving Blizzard was deeply painful for Kaplan, who expressed a desire for game developers to recognize their worth and not relinquish control to those who don’t appreciate it.

“Separating from Blizzard was one of the most painful things,” he reflected. “And I was very sad when I resigned, not realizing how broken I was until recently, like the mourning and grieving I had gone through.”