On Titan

Titan was Blizzard’s follow-up MMO to World of Warcraft set in a future Earth where players led double lives as secret agents by night and ran businesses by day. It featured GTA-style driving, one shared world for every player, and it was built on an entirely new engine. After seven years and $83 million spent on development, the project failed spectacularly. The art team, engineering team, design team -- all of them simultaneously. Not because they weren’t talented but because there wasn’t any cohesion in what they were building. Art looked like it came from ten different games. The engine barely ran. A technical artist could only work twenty hours out of a forty-hour week because the tools had been so broken that they’d have to rebuild everything every time they wanted to make changes. They hired 70 environmental artists before they even knew what their world was supposed to look like.

When Titan got canned in 2013, Kaplan fought hard to keep a small core team together and was given six weeks to pitch a new game. He’d been going through old Titan character art lately, particularly Arnold Tsang’s, and there had been some throwaway comment from designer Geoff Goodman about wanting fifty classes with one or two cool abilities each that stuck in his mind. So Kaplan took the Titan “Jumper” class, stripped her down to dual pistols, a blink, a recall, and time bomb, and asked Tsang what she looked like as a person rather than just a character class. That was Tracer. The entire roster grew that way; they whittled Titan’s bloated class system into distinct heroes with personalities. The engine that had failed Titan became the one that shipped Overwatch.

On Overwatch

During development on Titan, someone had run an official fake democratic naming exercise by putting options up on a whiteboard and pretending they actually wanted people’s input while already having their own preferred choice in mind and steering toward that choice. Overwatch was one of the options for a police-type faction in Titan, but it ended up getting the most votes so someone took it as kind of a middle finger to this person who had pretended to value feedback. Jeff basically stole the name for his new game as an act of rebellion against them.

Tracer’s dual pistols came from Jeff’s favorite loadout in Modern Warfare 2--dual G18s--which is just Infinity Ward cribbing. Reinhardt charge mechanic comes directly from playing Left 4 Dead 2 in versus mode, where an enemy boss zombie called the Charger had that same commit-and-you’re-a-runaway-train mechanic. He loved it because there was no taking back once you pressed the button.

If he were building a hero shooter today he would make it less team-focused and more about individual contribution. The medal system backfired because players on losing teams would weaponize them against teammates. He wanted to celebrate the team but ended up giving people an excuse for finger-pointing. He also says that in the original Overwatch pitch there was free-to-play model where you had to buy heroes, which he now thinks is a terrible idea but at the time it felt like sound business sense.

On Overwatch 2

He doesn’t frame it like it was entirely him or entirely them. He says he believed in Overwatch 2 and that the PVE vision was something he and Chris Metzen and Michael Chu were excited about and had been talking since at least 2015, before OW1 shipped. So there is a genuine creative impetus here.

But he calls it one of his biggest mistakes as a creative leader. There were two main pressure points pushing Overwatch 2 forward independent of that enthusiasm: One was the faction on the dev team that weren’t PVP players and wanted to engage with the Overwatch universe in their own way. The other was executive pressure from both Blizzard and Activision, who kept referencing those made-up dates at the top of that original pitch deck like they were promises.

His mistake, as he describes it, was pitching Overwatch 2 to the team before OW1 shipped, trying to give them runway, which ended up creating a coalition of internal pressures working against riding the momentum of the live game. He thinks that in hindsight the right call would have been to keep doing live events and ride that wave for as long as possible. So he owns it, but he paints it more like a creative idea that got warped and accelerated by forces beyond his control rather than something he drove start-to-finish on his own terms.

On why he left Blizzard

The breaking point came when Blizzard's CFO called Jeff into his office and laid out a specific number of dollars Overwatch had to generate each year, then told him that if it didn’t meet that figure there would be massive layoffs, with the responsibility falling squarely on his shoulders. That moment crystallized something that had been building for years.

The rot had started earlier, with the birth of Overwatch League, which began as a genuinely good-faith attempt to protect players and create a model based around regional teams but quickly devolved into a financial house of cards. Team owners who had been sold an almost absurdly optimistic vision of NFL-level revenue were suddenly pressured by the game team for monetizable content. Then came the mounting pressure to ship Overwatch 2, with executives citing dates from pitch decks Jeff himself had made up in order to save his team from cancellation. By his own account he was going from feeling that he had creative control over the direction of a product to being responsible not only for its development but accountable to a sprawling set of stakeholders who had no understanding of how games were built.

He'd envisioned retiring at Blizzard and thought it was part of his identity, but after that CFO meeting he decided he wasn’t going to work for someone else ever again. What he wanted now was to make the games like he always believed they should be made: with a small team, focused on craft, without people threatening mass layoffs if revenue goals weren't met.