The way Kaplan explains it, the good ship Overwatch started to buckle when unreasonable expectations were placed on the Overwatch League, a hugely hyped esports league founded in 2017 and closed in 2024.
"Originally the business model was going to be that they [Overwatch League] were going to do in-person events, and there’s going to be big ticket sales and merch and all of that. I think, really quickly, everybody learned we can’t do in-game events when we have a London team and a Shanghai team… like, how does this work? So that fell apart super quickly. The merch was good but it wasn’t going to be making NFL money, whatever insanity people thought that was going to be.
“So everybody [the investors] quickly defaulted back to, ‘hey, didn’t Overwatch make 500 million dollars just in the live game last year?’ What can we sell, and what can you give us? That pressure comes onto the [dev] team, and [add to that] the pressure to ship Overwatch 2, and then all the care and love that we had for the live game and the live service—like let’s make events, new heroes, new maps—we’re losing all these resources.”
“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.”
The redacted figures are due to a confidentiality agreement signed by Kaplan.
“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.”
God, that sounds like hell. Good on him for not taking that bs.
This really seems to be the direction that any successful venture eventually turns into: a vehicle for rich investors to insert their control and their ideas for the sake of turning out more profit for themselves. It’s never about making a better product or making it more affordable or accessible–it’s never about improving anything if it doesn’t satisfy the demands of someone with money that came along and bought enough stock in the company to take charge of it.
I have wondered about that in the past, how a small company goes public and picks up funding from a billionaire. Now he sits in his little office running his little company with 2 guys in black suits and sunglasses watching their every move. I just don’t get the warm and fuzzies when i think of capitalism anymore. To succeed puts you in league with some unbelievably ruthless and selfish people.
Well, they completely killed Overwatch chasing the money and it worked. People still play and constantly buy skins that cost more than entire games.
Stop subscribing to Blizzard games. They don’t deserve it.