Ex-Overwatch director says Blizzard threatened to lay off 1,000 devs if the game didn't make enough money, and blame him for it — "the biggest 'F*** you' moment I had in my career"

It's been nearly five years since Jeff Kaplan, the former game director of Blizzard Entertainment's (and now Xbox's, too) competitive multiplayer hero shooter Overwatch, left the studio in 2021. Very little was known about the reasons for Kaplan's departure then; now, though, he's revealed the catalyst for his exit.

Speaking in a colossal new five-hour-long interview with YouTuber and podcaster Lex Fridman, Kaplan revealed that he ultimately left Blizzard due to extreme demands for Overwatch revenue from the developer's chief financial officer at the time. Specifically, the CFO threatened to lay off 1,000 developers if Overwatch didn't hit certain performance targets, and told Kaplan they'd be blamed on him personally.

"What ultimately broke me and my Blizzard career was, I got called [into] the CFO's office, and he sits me down, and 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 [this amount of money] in 2020. And then every year after that, it needs a recurring revenue of [this amount of money],'" Kaplan explained.

"And then he says to me, 'If it doesn't [make this amount of money], we're gonna lay off 1,000 people. And that's gonna be on you,'" he continued. "And that was just the biggest 'F*** you' moment I had in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition ... I had believed I would never work any place but Blizzard."

"I loved it, it was a part of who I was, and 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 [that I would leave]. [But] that was it — I was like, 'We're done here.' Luckily, for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there," Kaplan added.

Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #493 - YouTube

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Kaplan then went on to discuss the presence of profit-first executives in creativity-fueled industries in general, asserting that developers and other creatives give up control of their work too easily when partnering with publishers or bringing financial officers into the fold.

"I think there's a message to creative people out there and people who make stuff — we're so focused on the love of the craft that we get lost in it, and we love doing it, and we're not cutthroat, and we don't have that kind of ambition, we have a different kind of ambition, but there's this whole world, especially as you're lucky enough to have success, that [is] very cutthroat and very ambitious," Kaplan said of the corporate and profit-centered side of the business.

"And for whatever reason, we keep giving ourselves to them. And we need to stop. World of Warcraft, when we made it, there was no CFO at Blizzard. You don't need a CFO to make World of Warcraft. You need artists, engineers, designers, producers, and an audio team," he pointed out.

Thus, he argues, the creative minds behind games should be more guarded with the "golden goose," and shouldn't give it to those who will prioritize chasing potential for maximum profit over doing what's best for their work in the long term.

"I wish developers would understand their own value more, and stop handing the golden goose to people who don't deserve it," Kaplan said.

I'm in full agreement with Kaplan here, personally, and it's tragic to learn that what essentially amounts to corporate blackmail is what drove him to leave Blizzard. I'm glad he still has a place in the industry, though; his new studio Kintsugiyama is working on The Legend of California, an open-world game with an emphasis on crafting.

🗨️ Over to you!

I was honestly pretty shocked to hear that Jeff Kaplan was given this ultimatum by the then-CFO of Blizzard, and it makes his sudden departure from the studio in 2021 all the more disheartening and sad. How do you feel about his rapid exit from the developer, and the reason for it? Let me know in the comments.

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