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A certain conversation with the company's CFO did not go to plan.
"Hello there, welcome back to GRTV News, I'm Alex, as always going through the afternoons latest and greatest when it comes to gaming, technology, entertainment, whatever you like, whatever you love, we always have it here for you at GRTV News and in the wider Gamereactor network as a whole."
"So if you like what you see and you want to see more, be sure to check out Gamereactor wherever you get it from for more gaming reviews, gaming previews, movie reviews, series reviews, exclusives, interviews, world news, sports news and of course so much more.
Without further ado though, today we're talking Jeff Kaplan, the former Overwatch director who revealed the reason why he left Blizzard after 19 years."
"Now Jeff Kaplan might not necessarily be a household name in terms of your video game knowledge but he's certainly a very, very important figure and was one at Blizzard and he believed he'd even retire there.
However, in a very long interview with Alex Freedman, Kaplan explained what went wrong at Blizzard, why he left Blizzard, his new game that he's working on as well as some more details which have kind of made Blizzard not seem very great in the last few years as you can probably guess by the fact that we're doing this news piece in the first place and by the fact that this has blown up so much online."
"By the way, this does technically come from yesterday but not a lot of news happened this morning, not a lot of newsworthy events so I thought we'd just talk about this because it is quite a massive development that we've seen take place.
As Jeff says here, as Marcus has caught in his news piece, a lot of Blizzard's internal culture had changed to wanting more money."
"It's probably quite obvious to see that considering the way that monetisation works in gaming nowadays in that you always need to be pushing more and more and more and that's just kind of the way that the capitalist culture works as a whole.
In any case though, that didn't really work out."
"As Kaplan explained, a final meeting was when the straw that broke the camel's back happened for him because he was speaking to Blizzard's CFO allegedly and that CFO told him, well if you don't make Overwatch make X amount of dollars in a given quarter or a given year then a thousand people are going to be fired and they're going to be fired because of you."
"So I'll just read out Jeff's quote here because I think it's really interesting.
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 at which the time was 2020 and was going to slip into 2021 but at the time it was 2020 and he said Overwatch has to make a redacted amount of dollars, that's been redacted by Friedman to make sure that nothing reflects fully on Kaplan in this, redacted in 2020 and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of again a redacted amount of dollars and then he says to me, if it doesn't do this amount of dollars we're going to lay off a thousand people and that's going to be on you and that was the biggest FU moment I've had in my career, it felt surreal in that condition."
"So yeah, Kaplan since his exit from Blizzard has been not at the face and the forefront of gaming but he has been quietly working on a Wild West themed project called Project California I believe and it does look quite interesting.
So at least there's sort of a silver lining there but this obviously reflects very badly on Blizzard and their alleged business method."
"We'll have to see whether this has any more ripple effects throughout the gaming industry but it's clear very much from the response to this that people are quite sick of how money hungry and money minded the gaming industry has become even though it's kind of always been about making money and selling games at the end of the day."
"Or do you disagree?
Let me know and I'll see you next week for some more GRTV news, goodbye!"
