When Jeff Kaplan, the creator of Overwatch, among other things, suddenly decided to leave Blizzard a few years ago, it caused quite a stir in the industry. He now talks more about this in a new interview with Lex Fridman, revealing what actually lay behind his decision, which according to him, was largely due to how much Blizzard's internal culture had changed and the almost insane pursuit of "more money".
Kaplan worked at Blizzard for almost two decades and was one of the driving forces behind successes such as World of Warcraft and, above all, Overwatch, where he served as the game's public face for many years.
In an interview, Kaplan says that a particularly high-profile event became a turning point. During a meeting with a Blizzard executive, he was told that if Overwatch did not meet certain financial targets, as many as one thousand employees would lose their jobs and that it would all be his fault.
<social>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9rF1CSSh-w</social>
"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 f**k you moment I've had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition."
After leaving Blizzard, Kaplan has kept a very low profile and is currently working on a new Wild West-themed project.