Before Blizzard's free-to-play multiplayer shooter Overwatch 2 arrived on the scene, there was the original paid experience led by game director (and fan favourite) Jeff Kaplan.
You might recall how Kaplan made an abrupt exit from the company behind Diablo and Warcraft in 2021, after almost 20 years of service. It left a lot of fans concerned about the future of Overwatch at the time, and now he's finally broken his silence on Lex Fridman's podcast.
In one segment, he mentions how things supposedly went downhill because of the commitments to the professional Esports competition "Overwatch League". When Activision Blizzard was unable to meet investor expectations, the onus was then placed on the development team, which led to "the pressure to ship Overwatch 2".
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Kaplan hit his own breaking point when he apparently found himself in a meeting with Activision Blizzard's CFO at the time, claiming he had to make so much money or future lay-offs would be on him. Here's the transcript courtesy of PC Gamer and you can watch this segment of the interview in the video below (note: the redacted figures are due to a confidentiality agreement):
"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 f**k you moment I've had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition."
Kaplan goes on to say he loved Blizzard and expected to retire there, but realised "that was it" for his career at the company at that point. He also noted how "luckily for Blizzard" the same CFO is no longer there. As noted by the source, Dennis Durkin was CFO between 2019 to May 2021, and his successor was Armin Zerza, who was in the role until 2025.
Overwatch 2 most-recently made the decision to drop the number from its title, with the Blizzard president Johanna Faries claiming it's a "timeless game" and the name should reflect this. In saying this, the title remains free-to-play and the collaborations with IP outside of the Blizzard universe continues. The latest one is a crossover with NieR: Automata.
As for Kaplan, he's now working on a new game called The Legend of California - an open-world action-survival shooter set in California during the gold rush era.