Jeff Kaplan, the former director of Overwatch and current studio lead at Kintsugiyama working on western action game The Legend of California, has been pretty candid in recent months about how bad things had gotten for him in his final years at Blizzard. He left the company in 2021 after what he described as the “biggest ‘fuck you’ moment” of his career when an Activision Blizzard exec threatened to lay off a thousand people at the company if Overwatch didn’t reach a certain profit that year. Kaplan’s interviews since announcing Legend of California have offered us some insight into just how stressful working on Overwatch had gotten leading up to the launch of Overwatch 2, and one particularly interesting anecdote he shared in an interview with Gaming World Interviews is about how the notoriously perplexing announcement of the sequel at Blizzcon 2019 came to be.
The hour-long interview touches on many points across Kaplan’s career, including his work on World of Warcraft before pivoting to Overwatch, the early days of the canceled Titan MMO that would pave the way to Overwatch, and what he’s doing now with Legend of California, but there’s a sizable portion of the show where he talks about how he slowly became disenchanted with his former employer. He cites a “revolving door” of Activision and Blizzard “business guys” coming in and making creative decisions, including a mandate that the team wasn’t allowed to work on new heroes for the original Overwatch because they had to work on Overwatch 2; thus, the years-long content drought. Kaplan says that working on Overwatch from 2018 to 2021 involved “constant fighting” with executives, until he finally felt like he no longer agreed with the way things were going.
One of those fights included announcing Overwatch 2 at Blizzcon 2019. At the time, the company promised a story campaign, cooperative missions, and a shared competitive ecosystem with the original game, but almost none of that has panned out in the years since the game’s official launch in 2022, and Blizzard has since dropped the 2 from the title entirely. It felt like players were watching Blizzard dismantle what it had promised in real time, and based on Kaplan’s recollection, it sounds like in his eyes, Blizzard prematurely announced the game.
“[I] got in a huge fight with, at the time, it wasn’t Mike [Morhaime]. I loved Mike, who was the president of Blizzard, and another president of Blizzard, my exec producer, over announcing Overwatch 2. [I] went into their office, I’m like, ‘What are we doing? We don’t really know what this game is, we don’t know what the business model is. This is a huge mistake.’”
Kaplan also says he was frustrated that Blizzard announced both Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV at the same time, feeling like it didn’t allow either game to have its “moment” at Blizzcon, which he ultimately believes was a decision made as a form of corporate cockswinging.
“They had a lot to prove as new executives,” he says. “They wanted to prove that ‘Blizzard’s back and Blizzard still has it.’ And I’m like, ‘you guys are fucking idiots,’ you know? I don’t know how else to put it, but after three years of just getting worn down and not agreeing with any of the decisions that were being made on the franchise and not feeling like I had agency anymore…before, I used to be like ‘I’m the game director, I get to decide the direction the game goes,’ and starting in 2018, I lost that. And after three years of fighting for it back, I realized this company belongs to these corporate people now, the Blizzard exec team, the Activision team, and I don’t really have a place here, and I’m tired of fighting. I don’t want to put my name on a project I don’t believe in.”
Kaplan doesn’t name any names, but timeline-wise, J. Allen Brack would have been the president when Overwatch 2 was initially announced in 2019. Brack stepped down from his role as president in 2021 following the company’s sexual harassment lawsuit scandal that year.
Despite it all, Overwatch is in a pretty good state these days, wrapping up its 10th anniversary with 10 new heroes and a revamped story, though Kaplan admits he doesn’t keep up with the game anymore, for his own sake.
