Jeff Kaplan has spoken up on his exit from Blizzard and Overwatch.
In a new interview with Lex Fridman, Kaplan spoke about his regrets over Overwatch League and Overwatch 2. But he also talked about how Blizzard management compelled him to leave all of it instead of trying to fight and bring the franchise back.
In Kaplan’s words:
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.
Kaplan is well known as the creative lead behind Overwatch, and his exit continues to be lamented to this day.
Fans believe they identified the Blizzard CFO in question as one Dennis Durkin, who left Blizzard in 2021.
In the years since, Activision Blizzard was acquired by Microsoft, and Overwatch is now experiencing a resurgence thanks to a new plan and an unexpected hero.