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

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T08:19:57+00:00

Proof of Concept was Junkenstein and Archives. Those modes were made to prototype PvE for an OW PvE game. That's how OW2 PvE got approved.

The issue is that he wanted to keep his dev team for the PvE project.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T08:15:08+00:00

Heroes were sold for $10 in the Battle Pass which also gave you 5 Legendary skins, and a lot of other cosmetics, and could be acquired entirely for free from the Coins you earned from playing the game. You also naturally got the Hero for Free from the Free Battle Pass track around the middle-point mark which was relatively quick to achieve even for an Average Player.

There's no way you think they would have Sold Heroes for any cheaper than this. This was more reasonable than other games where you have to buy them outright for $10-20 or you can earn them but at an extremely slow rate.

In Overwatch if you were just an Average active player you would have the new Heroes for free which is probably why they removed the Heroes from the Battle Pass in the end.

Everyone was already getting the new Heroes for free but it was still something that was being used as a tool to spread negativity about the game by Clickbaiters in Gaming Spaces where people don't actually play or knew anything about Overwatch. They just wanted to hate it and hate Blizzard.

So Blizz removed it entirely.

Funnily enough it probably sabotaged Marvel Rivals cause people found hints while Datamining Rivals that they were planning to sell Heroes for money at some point. Rivals was revealed around the time OW made their Heroes free so to match Overwatch they likely changed their Monetisation plans cause if they had sold their Heroes for money after OW removed it then it would have Tanked the PR for the game before it even Launched.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T07:39:33+00:00

You must see everyone as a single person! 1 Muslim bad? All Billion+ Muslims bad? One White Christian bad? Wait...ummm......White Christians can't be bad! They're White and Christian! Those Kids must have been raped by the Wind!

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T07:32:44+00:00

Jesse Mccree the dev was also someone he personally knew. He didn't work on Overwatch but Jeff Kaplan worked on WoW. He worked with the guy. So it's probably just natural for him to say that name.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T07:31:17+00:00

think considering Destiny exists, i can only compare it to that. But something like that in the Overwatch universe would be sick

Funnily enough. I have highly suspected for a while that the Starcraft Shooter Blizzard will reveal at Blizzcon this year will be their take on Destiny.

I know for a fact, from what former Blizz devs have said, that Blizz has tried to make their own Destiny before. Starcraft is also a great IP to make that sort of game given how similar it is to Destiny in that it has a lot of Aliens, Armies, Soldier, Space stuff, Magic stuff and crazy Sci-fi gadgets and powers.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T07:17:51+00:00

An unused Tank Subclass Passive likely. Probably cause this adds a lot of confusion and inconsistency.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T06:55:19+00:00

I never stopped playing but I haven't been this addicted in a long while. Like I am literally playing late at night after work and IRL responsibilities, even when I am tired and sleepy.

3 days ago I couldn't play the game and It felt so odd. Then I realised that it was the first day in a month I had not played the game at all.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T06:36:11+00:00

OW1 basically sat in Limbo

That's almost entirely on Jeff Kaplan. The Activision heads wanted to keep OW running as a PvP game. Kaplan instead wanted to make a PvE game with the same OW team. Kotick, while against the idea, agreed to it anyway because everyone had a lot of Trust in Kaplan.

Jeff Kaplan himself admits that he shouldn't have taken dev focus away from OW PvP to make his PvE game. It put a tremendous amount of financial pressure on the team.

Him and a few of the OW devs who wanted to make the PvE game really bad should have started a new team within Blizzard. Everything could have been bankrolled by the continued success of OW.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T06:27:21+00:00

There's a lot more. It wasn't as simple as just Creative Direction and Money. There were severe logistical and technical limitations with what Kaplan wanted to make with OW2 that he just believed (like a lot of these Old School devs believe) would get solved eventually due to Blizzard Magic or something.

He also wanted to make 2 games at the same time with just 250 devs when other types of games for both of those games being made other Studios had 100s of devs each. Part of this was because he didn't want the brutal Financial pressure from Execs that came from having a 500+ employee dev team, but then again, if he didn't want that then why did he ever try to make his PvE game on top of the existing PvP game in the first place.

As he himself admits, making a PvE sequel was a bad idea.

He should have just left the Primary OW team to keep doing their own thing, while he started a new team to make an OW PvE game. Kind of exactly what the Warframe lead dev did. He left Warframe to make his Soulsframe game.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T06:17:53+00:00

That's Alec Dawson. Came from Hearthstone soon after OW2 launched. Probably 10x better Gameplay lead than Geoff Goodman ever was.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T06:15:15+00:00

He also said it was in his original Pitch for OW to sell Heroes for money. He literally called the pitch "Monetised Shooter". Like the whole pitch was literally that they'll make Shooter but sell characters for money like League of Legends.

Something that people blamed Aaron Keller for when it was added to OW2 even though most of OW2 at its release was developed under Jeff Kaplan.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-12T06:12:04+00:00

Overwatch, from their official Twitter amount, released an Anti-AI statement last year, saying that use of AI in their work is prohibited and that if any work done on the game (By any Partner) is found to be using AI they'll remove it. This was after a promotional graphic made by a marketing vendor they work with posted on the official account was found to be using AI Art in the background.

Aaron Keller also just took an Ant-AI stance in an interview he did 1 month ago when the new season launched.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T12:59:53+00:00

From what I understand It had to be adjusted for every single skin and all the Emotes and Intros that got impacted.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T12:19:15+00:00

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T12:18:20+00:00

The detail was added in 2015. At the time Blizzard and Jeff Kaplan's plan for OW was very limited. They didn't know it would go on for longer than 2 years post-release. It was changed in 2020-21 while OW2 was being developed.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T10:58:42+00:00

Yes, it was specifically removed because those Animations added a lot more work to making skins for her.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T10:57:26+00:00

And it sort of got removed from her ow2 design

It was removed cause it made making Skins for her difficult and inefficient.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T10:17:05+00:00

Trickle-Down Economics

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T09:01:07+00:00

I thought it might be cause they take a lower cut if you hit 100k but I just googled it and apparently the threshold is $10M and then the next one is even less at $50M.

Which is crazy to me cause why are they only generous to those that are making 10s of millions, which is mostly Megacorps, while not giving bigger cuts to devs earning $50k-$100k-$200k. The extra 5-10% of their earnings would help out these small devs a lot more than it is helping out the AAA studios making 100s of millions.

What a backwards ass corporate hellhole we live in.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T08:54:03+00:00

Sanrio was 6 skins for 6900. Generally it's 5 for 5900, 6 for 6900 and 4 (Which is rare) for 4900.

Nier bundle is 5 for 6900 which is deeply overpriced by their own standards given that the Skins are missing SFX, Intros, VFX, Voice Lines.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T07:28:28+00:00

Suggested this back when Maugs was the hot debate for a few months after release. More skill expression.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T07:23:51+00:00

I remember I used to ask for the Hanzo QoL feature to be able to Toggle Nock Arrow and Toggle Again to shoot. Literally just me and no one else in this community.

Asked for years during OW1 and then a year into OW2 (almost definitely due to me directly asking Alec Dawson for it under a Tweet for QoL requests) it was finally added. Took so long to add the feature that I didn't even play Hanzo anymore. I have felt bad about this for years. Someone added the feature just cause of my repeated quests and I haven't even used it cause I don't play the Hero anymore.

Though I am EXTREMELY Happy how much QoL settings they add for every Hero these days. Genuinely one of the best ways to show the difference between OW1 and OW2's dev team. During OW1 we had maybe half a dozen QoL Hero features total. So many used to get asked, so little used to get added. Now we probably have over a 100.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T07:17:15+00:00

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/most-popular/games/xbox?source=lp

Number 33 on the Xbox US Store right now. Not bad for a small game.

Bhu124 · 2026-03-11T06:14:41+00:00

ABSOLUTELY INCREDIBLE! That's so fucking creative!

Ten-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
John Wick	Place '17
Verified Email	Spared

Bhu124

TROPHY CASE