Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan on his exit from Activision Blizzard: 'It was the biggest f**k you moment I've had in my career'

Overwatch co-creator Jeff Kaplan was the public face of Overwatch before he left Activision Blizzard in 2021. If you were interested in videogames between 2014 and 2021, it's likely you'll recognise his face. In a new interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, Kaplan details for the first time how and why he left Activision Blizzard, and it's not pretty.

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.

"Where it got away from us is that there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much," Kaplan said. "It got overmarketed to the people buying the teams. They went on this roadshow where they had a deck—and you can put anything in a deck, and sell anything—and they were pretty much selling the Brooklyn Bridge, that Overwatch League was going to be more popular than the NFL."

In the end, after enduring the difficulties of managing Overwatch League expectations with development on the core game itself, Kaplan was sent over the edge by an exquisitely cruel meeting with the company's then CFO.

"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."

Dennis Durkin was CFO of Activision Blizzard from 2019 to May 2021; Armin Zerza held the role from then until 2025. Kaplan's departure was announced on April 20, 2021.

I've reached out to Activision Blizzard for comment.

After releasing in 2023 without many key advertised features, including a long-promised PvE mode, Overwatch 2 was eventually renamed Overwatch earlier this year.