If you were an Overwatch fan back in the day, you were probably familiar with Jeff from the Overwatch team, as he would introduce himself when speaking to the playerbase. Jeff Kaplan was the face of Overwatch from its launch up until 2021, when he left the game and Blizzard behind.
Now, Kaplan has shed some light on his departure and some of the issues behind the scenes at that time. Kaplan says a whole lot of it was down to Overwatch League, or more specifically, the unrealistic expectations of investors, which impacted the workload put onto the dev team.
As reported by PC Gamer, Kaplan discussed this on the Lex Fridman Podcast. Here, he explained what expectations were put on the developers - and how an exec threatened to lay off 1,000 workers if the team didn't meet its targets.
He starts by talking about Overwatch League. "It got overmarketed to the people buying the teams," he says. "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...
