We have some new insight on the alleged battle behind the scenes in Blizzard between Overwatch creative lead Jeff Kaplan, and the studio’s owner, Bobby Kotick.
We have known for years that Kaplan and Kotick clashed behind the scenes. A few months after Kaplan left the company, a Blizzard producer came forward to claim that he tried to shield the Overwatch team from corporate BS. Today, however, Jason Schreier shared some new insight in that battle behind the scenes, that threatens to undo the narrative fans have created.
Jason was asked about the reasons that Kaplan and Chacko Sonny, who also led the Overwatch team at the time, left Blizzard in 2021. As it turns out, this had everything to do particularly with the shift from Overwatch to Overwatch 2.
Jason shared a summary of a story he told in his upcoming book Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment. You can pre-order the book here, but we’ll share what he said in the AMA below:
“Yes – this is covered extensively in the book, but here’s the short version. Overwatch 1 was a huge success, and Bobby Kotick was thrilled about it.
So thrilled, in fact, that he asked the board of directors to give Mike Morhaime a standing ovation during one meeting.
But following OW1’s release, Team 4 began to run into a bit of a problem: they had too much work to do.
They had to simultaneously: 1) keep making new stuff for OW1, which almost accidentally turned into a live-service game; 2) work on OW2, which was Jeff Kaplan’s baby and would have brought more players into the universe via PVE; and 3) help out with the ever-growing Overwatch League.
Kotick’s solution to this problem was to suggest that Team 4 hire more people. Hundreds more people, like his Call of Duty factory. And start a second team to work on OW2 while the old team works on OW1 (or vice versa).
Kaplan and Chacko Sonny were resistant to this, because they believed pretty strongly in the culture they’d built (more people can sometimes lead to more problems and less efficient development), and it led to all sorts of problems as the years went on.”
So, this may be a hard pill to swallow for fans of Overwatch, Blizzard, and especially those who liked Jeff Kaplan. But if the story Schreier picked up from his sources is accurate, Kaplan and Sonny were in the wrong when it came to Overwatch.
If Kaplan and Sonny had their way, the Overwatch team would have not added more people, and the same team would have been working on both Overwatch and Overwatch 2, as well as build Overwatch League at the same time.
Because they were resistant to building the Overwatch team, they would then find it exceedingly difficult to meet all those expectations fans had, and make failure inevitable. As we know now, of course, that is precisely what happened. Blizzard convinced fans they needed to abandon Overwatch for Overwatch 2, and then failed to deliver on everything they promised that would be on Overwatch 2.
So, obviously, this revelation does not change Kotick’s failure to get the game set in the right direction. Aaron Keller and Jared Neuss made their own mistakes after taking over as the new Overwatch leads, but Kotick ultimately chose them, and didn’t intervene properly to fix the problems as they piled on.
But if Kotick was not in the picture, it’s clear that Kaplan and Sonny would have made their own mistakes anyway. Maybe they could have steered the ship better earlier, after making those mistakes. But the state of Overwatch 2 today, as it turns out, was still on their shoulders after all.
