Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan has said that he was told by the Chief Financial Officer that if Overwatch 2 didn’t achieve certain revenue goals set by the company that “we’re gonna lay off a 1000 people and it’s gonna be on you.” He said that it was the biggest f**k you moment I’ve had in my career. In a new interview Kaplan explained what he believes went wrong with Overwatch and says that it all went downhill after unreasonable expectations were placed on the Overwatch League, which ultimately drained the developers and their resources. He went on to say that he had initially believed that he would always be at Blizzard, but the pressure put upon him became too much to bear and he left.
“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 fuck you moment I’ve had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition.”
“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 1400 people working on it, so if we just hire 1400 people and make it free-to-play, we’ll make that money, right?’ I had believed that I would never work in any place but Blizzard, I loved it, it was a part of who I was, and I thought that I was a part of it. And I literally thought I’d retire from the place. I never thought the day would come, but that was it. Luckily for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there.”
I believe this account because it just lines up so accurately with Overwatch through that period of time. It is so frustrating that no amount of success is ever enough for these people. You don’t need to be literally Fortnite to be successful. And there’s just not room for many games of that magnitude.
Agreed. It was quite bizarre seeing so many companies spend a mind boggling amount of money to try to become the next Fortnite. Then we see Nintendo making traditional games, and they are doing just fine.
If overwatch 2 was gonna be developed by Jeff without no dumb shareholders and managers telling him what he had to do, it would have been unironically one of my favorite games ever