Jeff Kaplan, who worked at Blizzard for almost 20 years, has explained the main reason why he left the company in 2021.
This comes from a much wider interview via Lex Fridman, going over Kaplan's whole career, including his role as game director of the original Overwatch.
We've time-stamped the moment he talks about what motivated his resignation in the video below:
Kaplan recalls a meeting with Blizzard's CFO at the time, who gave him a date of 2020. He told Kaplan that Overwatch needed to make a certain amount of money within that year, and each year after that requires a certain amount of revenue. These amounts were redacted from the interview.
He was told that if these targets weren't met, the company would "lay off a thousand people, and that's gonna be on you."
"That was just the biggest 'f*ck you' moment I had in my career," Kaplan says. "It felt surreal to be in that condition."
"As somebody who's worked on a lot of games [...] you get in these meetings where they're like, 'Fortnite has 1400 people working on it, if you just hire 1400 people and make it free-to-play, we'll make that money, right?' I had believed I would never work any place but Blizzard [...] but that was it. I was like, we're done here."
It's an enormous amount of pressure to put on just one person, so we don't blame Kaplan for wanting to step away.
A little earlier in the interview, Kaplan talks about there being "too much" excitement about Overwatch League, an ambitious plan to take the game in a serious eSports direction that would see regional teams sell for millions.
Ultimately the Overwatch dev team couldn't pull it all together; it ended up being a "house of cards" it couldn't deliver on.
There was also a motion to make a sequel in an effort to keep the money rolling in. The original game made $1 billion revenue in its first year, and it seems there was a lot of pressure to keep this momentum going.
Currently, Overwatch is bouncing back after the pretty disastrous launch of Overwatch 2. The game is now simply called Overwatch, and it's slowly winning back players, but for a long time the game has been in a bad position.