Former supervision Game director and former face of the brand, Jeff Kaplan, left Blizzard Entertainment in 2021, after 19 years with the company. He’s been quietly working on another game since leaving, and recently spoke out about his decision to leave Blizzard, the company he once thought he would “retire” from. Unsurprisingly, Kaplan has revealed that the catalyst for his departure from Blizzard and supervision It was what many expected: corporate meddling and unbridled greed on the part of parent company Activision Blizzard.
Kaplan appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast on Wednesday for a five-hour interview, during which he discussed his early career at Blizzard, his work on world of warcraftand the ups and downs of supervision. While Kaplan mostly shows affection for his time working at Blizzard, he identifies where things started to go wrong. supervision and what ultimately led to his resignation.
“The biggest derailment was the Overwatch League,” Kaplan said, referring to the now-shuttered esports league founded in 2017. As a result of the overselling of Activision Blizzard’s Overwatch League, the “executive pressure was monumental,” he said.
“There was a lot of enthusiasm for the Overwatch League. A lot,” Kaplan recalled. “It was marketed too much to the people who bought the equipment. They went on this tour […] and they were practically selling the Brooklyn Bridge, that Overwatch League was going to be more popular than the NFL.”
After billionaire investors bought the league for a reported $20 million, they began demanding new features in supervision that the development team was not prepared to handle, at least not while they were trying to execute supervision like a live game and make it grow. Twitch integration, camera control for streams, and uniforms for OWL teams forced the task. supervision team, Kaplan said.
“All your plans at that moment go out the window,” Kaplan said. “You’re not working on new world events, you’re not even really focused on supervision 2“You’re just treading water.”
Kaplan called the Overwatch League “a house of cards” and “a great idea with the wrong instincts.”
“There was too much attention on we are going to make a lot of money very quickly“, said.
Finally, the owners of the Overwatch League realized that no, Blizzard’s esports league was not going to eclipse the NFL.
“Originally, the business model was going to be that they were going to do in-person [Overwatch League] events, and there will be big ticket sales and merch and all that,” Kaplan recalled. “Very quickly, everyone learned that we can’t do in-game events when we have a team from London and a team from Shanghai. How does this work? So that fell apart very quickly. The merchandising was good, but it wasn’t going to make NFL-level money, no matter how crazy someone thought it was going to be.
“So quickly everyone went back to saying, ‘Hey, aren’t you supervision Did he make $500 million in live gaming alone last year? What can we sell and what can you give us? That pressure gets to the team, and then the pressure to send supervision 2and then all the care and love we had for the live game and the live service – let’s create events, new heroes, new maps – we’re losing all these resources.”
Kaplan said that in 2016 and 2017 he “felt a lot of control” as a game director, but when the Overwatch League came to life, “it ended up being a drag.”
While the pressure sounds intense, it wasn’t the failure of the Overwatch League (the league officially closed in 2024) that convinced him to quit his dream job. It was a meeting with an Activision Blizzard executive.
“What finally broke me and my career at Blizzard was that I was called into the CFO’s office, and he sat me down and said […] ‘supervision have to do [redacted] in 2020, and then every year after that, you need a recurring income of [redacted],'” Kaplan recalled. “And then he says, ‘If it doesn’t work [redacted] dollars, we are going to lay off a thousand people, and that will be your responsibility. And that was the biggest “fuck you” moment I’ve ever had in my career. “It felt surreal to be in that condition.”
(Kaplan’s comments on specific figures are aired and redacted in the podcast due to a confidentiality agreement.)
“I had believed I would never work anywhere else but Blizzard,” Kaplan said. “I loved it, it was part of who I was and I felt like I was part of it. And I literally thought I was going to walk away from the place. I never thought the day would come, and that was it. I thought: We’re done here. Luckily for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there.”
Activision Blizzard’s CFO at the time was executive Dennis Durkin. He left the company in May 2021, a month after Kaplan.
Kaplan is now working on a new game, The legend of Californiathat doesn’t look like anything supervision. Kaplan’s new studio, Kintsugiyama, describes their new venture as “a multiplayer action-survival FPS set on the California island during the Gold Rush era.” Dreamhaven, the publisher founded by former Blizzard boss Mike Morhaime, will publish the game.
Soruce: polygon.com