What broke Kaplan at Blizzard: revenue targets and Overwatch 2

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 4:14:35

   we could have made a great i have a lot of hindsight of like how i would have designed that game differently with what i know now versus what ultimately we didn't ship and i'm not there's overwatch 2 is out now but it's not the overwatch 2 that we planned and announced so when you're referring to overwatch 2 in this conversation you're referring to the pve version the pve version which by the way i would have loved to play i'm one of the people that were overwatch is great but the pvp but i i would have loved to play the pve version i think everybody would have loved to play it and there's a misconception online that all i cared about was pve and i didn't care about pvp all of the overwatch 2 pvp maps were something that i said to the team over and over we have a pvp audience if we get anything right it has to be the pvp we would be lucky to welcome these pve

2. 4:15:35

   players but that's not guaranteed so it was never a pve only focus it's just almost expanding it to also the yeah and what eventually broke me was it used to be like in 2016 and 2017 i felt very in control of the Overwatch team and the direction of the game as a game director, you know, working with Ray Gresko as the production director. It felt like we were running Overwatch and we were very, very successful and doing a good job. And I think the fans were happy. And then as we transitioned, you know, Overwatch League was the best intention. You know, my parents always say the road to hell is paved with good intentions that was the overwatch league and it ended up being an albatross and then overwatch 2 was the same thing and what it boiled down for me like what sort of ultimately broke me in my blizzard career was i got called in the cfo's office

3. 4:16:44

   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 **** in 2020. And then every year after that, it needs a recurring revenue of ****. And then he says to me, if it doesn't do dollars. We're going to lay off a thousand people and that's going to be on you. And that was just the biggest fuck you moment I had in my career. It felt surreal to be in that condition. And as somebody who's worked on a lot of games, made a lot of games, you get in these meetings where they're like, there's 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. And that was, I had believed I would never work any place, but Blizzard. I loved it. It was a part of who I was.

4. 4:18:03

   And I felt I was a part of it. And I literally thought I would retire from a place. I never thought the day would come and uh that was it i was like it's we're done here luckily for blizzard that cfo is no longer there i mean blizzard is one of the greatest companies in in the history