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Overwatch co-creator and former director Jeff Kaplan was obviously a huge part of the shooter's success and very publicly so, frequently appearing at in-person events and recorded streams. He's now shed light on why he left Activision Blizzard in 2021 after cementing himself as such a beloved figure in the game's community for nearly a decade and, urm, it's not because he wanted an early retirement.
Kaplan recalls that after Overwatch's initial launch in 2016, he "felt very in control of the Overwatch team and the direction of the game" in an interview with Lex Fridman. He was steering the wheel on a very sturdy ship. Some endeavours that began with good intentions began to rock the boat, like Overwatch 2 and The Overwatch League, but the director's breaking point was allegedly a dramatic meeting with a former executive at the company.
"What sort of ultimately broke me in my Blizzard career was I got called into the CFO's office," Kaplan says. "And he says, '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] dollars, we're gonna lay off 1,000 people and that's gonna be on you.' And that was the biggest f**k you moment I had in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition... Luckily for Blizzard that CFO is no longer there."
The dollar amounts were bleeped out due to Jeff Kaplan's confidentiality agreement with Activision Blizzard.
Kaplan also remembers another head-scratching meeting with an unnamed executive who thought that Overwatch could make Fortnite money if the first-person shooter simply went free-to-play and hired 1,400 developers.
Overwatch definitely went through its rough patches during Kaplan's tenure, but his passion for the game and its characters were always really evident. He even expresses that he "loved" the company and never thought he would work anywhere else. "It was a part of who I was, I felt I was a part of it. And I literally thought I would retire from that place. I never thought the day would come."
When exactly that fateful meeting took place is unclear, though Activision Blizzard had Dennis Durkin as its CFO between 2019 and 2021. Spencer Neumann held the position shortly before but was fired in a dramatic move to Netflix.
Overwatch has since steadied the ship. Earlier this year, the game dropped five new heroes (and the '2' from its name) and saw a huge resurgence in players.
