YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Kaplan

lines on the record
326
first
2026-03-11
most recent
2026-03-11
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “The start is Mike, Allen, and Frank. It was run by three gamers. They were all three of them programmers. They made the games before they just ran the company. So they knew what each of us as developers beneath them were going through, and they protected us. They shielded us from all of the nonsense. And even when they would align with a business person, they had a COO in the early days named Paul Sams. And Paul protected us. You know, they just found great people who got it. The company when I joined was like 95% developers in like five percent operations. When I left, it was 50-50, and that's like a 4500 person company.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It broke me. I think after you've been at a place like Blizzard, which I love Blizzard to this day, I have nothing but warm, fond memories. I mean, there's those moments where you're like, I wish that hadn't happened. But on the whole, that place is mecca for game development. And everything I have. Is due to blizzard. They provided for me and my family, made me the person I am. So separating from Blizzard was one of the most painful things. And I was very sad when I resigned. And I didn't realize how broken I was until recently the morning grieving I had gone through of like I think I'm a little fucked in the head for not being there anymore. How could I give that up? How could I not be there anymore? It was really, really painful leaving.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You figure it out. And there are great finance guys. Like, I've worked with finance guys who get it and get out of the way and respect and they're gamers and they sort of understand, but like. I wish developers would understand their own value more and stop handing the golden goose to people who don't deserve it.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think there's a message to creative people out there and people who make stuff were generally so focused on the love of the craft that we get lost in it and we love doing it and we're not cutthroat. And we don't have that kind of ambition. We have a different kind of ambition. But there's this whole world, especially as soon as you're lucky enough to have success that are very cutthroat and very ambitious and for whatever reason we keep Giving ourselves to them And we need to stop giving ourselves World of Warcraft when we made it, there was no CFO at Blizzard. Don't need a CFO to make World of Warcraft. You need artists, engineers, designers, producers, and an audio team.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “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, Fortnite has 1400 people working on it. If you just hire 1,400 people and make it free to play, we'll make that money, right? And that was, I had believed I would never work anyplace but Blizzard. I loved it. It was a part of who I was. And I felt I was a part of it. And I literally thought I would retire from the place. I never thought the day would come. And that was it. I was like, It's Done here. Luckily for Blizzard, that CFO is no longer there.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “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 progress. 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 Going to lay off a thousand people, and that's going to be on you. That was just the biggest fuck you moment I had in my career.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “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 working with Ray Gresco as the production director felt like we were running Overwatch. And we were very, very successful in 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. He sits me down and he says. He gives me a date.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Think everybody would have loved to have played 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 players, but that's not guaranteed. So it was never a PVE only focus.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So everybody quickly defaulted back to, hey, didn't Overwatch make like $500 million just in the live game last year? What can we sell and what can you give us? That pressure comes onto the team. And then the pressure to ship Overwatch 2 and all care and love that we had for like the live game and the live server. Let's just make events and new heroes and new maps. We're losing all these resources. And it got to the point. You know, my exit at Blizzard, I believed in Overwatch 2. I think we could have made a great, I have a lot of hindsight of how I would have designed that game differently with what I know now versus what ultimately we didn't ship. And there's Overwatch 2 is out now, but it's not the Overwatch 2 that we planned and announced.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The financial reality kicked in. Where these teams, now we didn't just have executives at Activision and Blizzard who cared about the bottom line of Overwatch. We had all these people who basically invested in the game. And then they started to express their opinions. Originally, the business model was going to be that they were going to do in-person events and there's going to be big ticket sales and then merch, you know, and all of that. And I think really quickly everybody learned like, yeah, we can't do in game events when you have a London team and a Shanghai team. And like, how does this work? So that fell apart super quickly. The merch was good, but it wasn't going to be making NFL level money, whatever insanity anybody thought that was going to be”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Not damning, but there was too much focus on let's make lots of money really fast. And a lot of people got dragged into it. And while Overwatch League was great for Overwatch in terms of the players that it brought in, like, and the Overwatch League players, they were awesome. I love them. The Overwatch League staff at Blizzard, some of the nicest, most motivated, great creative people, like all these organizations got built and they were all great, but it was a house of cards waiting to fall.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And so all of your plans at that point kind of go out the window. Like you're not going to work on new world events. You're not really even focused on Overwatch 2. You're just kind of treading water. There was a lot of talk of like, oh, God, you know, the deal, like the deal didn't go well and we've got to do make goods to make the deal better for them. I'm like, just give them some money back, you know? Like if you, the deal isn't what people wanted, like putting it on us, the Overwatch team, to support this beast. And it was a great idea that the wrong instincts and sort of I don't know how to phrase this in a way that”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “The day I got back, they said we signed this huge deal with Twitch for streaming of Overwatch League, like a media rights deal. And that means that here's all these commitments we made for Overwatch League of like in-game stuff that had to exist. Like a lot of it was integration with Twitch and camera control and that kind of stuff. The other part of it was a bunch of skins and uniforms for all the teams, which was not just getting the art in the game, but there was huge technical challenges to how all that worked and was efficient and hit the right memory footprint and all that kind of stuff.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, the team's part of the dream was more of like regional based player protection, try to make esports more of a first-class citizen because there were all these stories about like shady teams, you know, screwing their players over. Where it got away from us was there was a lot of excitement about Overwatch League, like too much so. And then it got overmarketed to the people buying the teams. They went on this road show where they had a deck, basically. And like 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. And we got a bunch of billionaire investors in these teams. And when 2018 started like, for example,”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, we had a coalition on the team that was really wanting overwatch two built instead of the live events, and then the executive pressure became monumental. And what would have been correct was to do more world events, like keep it going. But the major derail was Overwatch League. And we really like the weirdest part about Overwatch League is I believe in it. You know, I helped pitch it along with some other people. We thought it was like the future of esports and doing regional-based teams, ensuring minimum player salaries and player protections. Like there was a lot of very good about Overwatch League.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Which was fucking nuts. Like, that was just crazy. There's this phrase of catch the wave, ride the wave. Most games fall off the back of the wave. They don't catch the wave. No one plays it or plays it for two weeks. If you're lucky enough to have caught the wave, you're Right it till the end. And my instincts at that point were like, let's just keep how many more are these live events can we do?”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “We also had these two developers, Mike Hiberg and Dave Adams, worked on this quirky, like they made soccer in Overwatch. We called it Lucio Ball. They made a map and they made these mechanics. We're like, yeah, let's do an event called the Summer Games. And we do a live patch that's the summer games. It's extremely successful. And then after that, we're like, yeah, let's do Halloween's coming up. Let's do a Halloween event. How cool will that be? And our fans just loved these events, but there were two groups that were struggling with it. One was that group I told you on the dev team who was like, oh my God, you guys are overscoping the patches. Why are we doing this Halloween event? We should be doing, we should start work on Overwatch 2. We shouldn't be this focus on the live game.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Put tracer on a tablet and say we have a mobile strategy. So The executive started getting really angry at us that Overwatch 2 was slipping, slipping. And so when Overwatch One took off, I remember very early we were in like May of 2016. And that year, the Olympics were going to be in Rio, I think. And I always like to pay respects to when a big event is happening. I'm like, hey, we should do an event for the Olympics. You can't call it the Olympics or else they sue you. So you just, even though you're advertising for them to a bunch of kids who want to play video games and not watch the Olympics.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “It was, you never want to put a PowerPoint deck in front of a corporate executive. Like, you might as well etch it in stone and come down from the mountain on it.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “PvP or competitive shooters, and they really love the Overwatch universe and wanted to play these characters and heroes, but they wanted to kind of do it on their own terms in a PVE setting. So even though Overwatch is like runaway success and everybody's talking about it, they felt like they couldn't really engage with it. And so people on the dev team are like, okay, then God, we ship that PvP thing. When do we start work on this other thing? So that came from a genuine place of excitement. And then the other point of pressure was from the executive team. And this was both the blizzard and more so the Activision executive teams. And they started really putting the heat on, well, you said Overwatch. Was going to be out in 2019, and they're referring back to these slides that were just crazy dates.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yes, so the PVE piece was what Overwatch 2 was supposed to be. And I don't know if people know this or not, but we started working on Overwatch 2 in 2015. So Over Overwatch. One didn't ship until 2016. So before Overwatch, and it wasn't like work in earnest. It was like pitching the game. I remember I spent a lot of time. It was myself, Chris Metson, and Michael Chu sort of brainstorming a framework for what like a campaign could look like. And we had this idea of like a cooperative PVE shooter. And we actually pitched it to the team before we launched because we were trying to put a bunch of runway in front of us that worked against us. And it's one of my biggest mistakes I've made as a creative leader in my career was Overwatch 2. There were two points of failure for me. The first was I had people on the game team who didn't like”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “You know, there's a lot of haters like Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 were the pinnacle of Call of Duty, with Black Ops being a very respectable third, but you're never going to get a better gun feel from a game than just study the visual effects, the animation, the modeling, the sounds. Every aspect of shooting a gun in Call of Duty is so masterfully done. And then the maps, like the flow of the multiplayer, is just great, like there's a map called Crash from Call of Duty 4 that Aaron Keller and I, Aaron's now the game director on Overwatch. We just sat and studied that map or terminal from Modern Warfare 2, just studied the maps of just like this map design is off the hook. Call of Duty is definitely up there.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Offlines when, like, hey, I think that my neighbor logged off for the night. They just played six hours. I've been watching them. And now there's no activity in their base. So I'm going to blow up their walls and take up all their stuff when they're not here.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Real low lows debilitating Like, am I ever going to play this game, Lowe's? You know, like you spend. A week building the world's most perfect base and getting tons of loot. And then there's what's called online rating and offline rating. Online rating means that my enemy is, I can see that they're in their base right now, and I'm going to try to attack them while they're in their base. Offlining, which is like all Rust players will say you're the scum of the earth if you offline someone. And then all Rust players also offline people all the time. Yeah, it's Gamer etiquette”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “It would be like PvPing and wow. Imagine in World of Warcraft. If somebody could not only kill you but take everything that's in your bank and make you level one the next time you log in”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, and then you build what Russ players called bases and you upgrade the base and you try to make the bass as safe as possible to store your stuff. And then you can make explosives and blow up other people's walls to get into their base where they're keeping all their best stuff and take all their shit.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “They're too busy playing Russ. They're too busy checking on their base, making sure it's not rated to write you letters. It takes place. It's basically Its open world, you can do whatever you want. There's not really any directed gameplay to it, but at any time, any other player can kill you and take anything that's on you.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, rust is an open world game, it's a procedural map. So it means that every time it's different, you're always on an island and it resets every month.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And we downplayed your individual contribution as much as possible. There wasn't a scoreboard. We had a metal system, but the metal system was, in my opinion, it was not good because the losing team got medals and the winning team got medals. And on the losing team, they would use that. They would weaponize it against their teammate. Well, I'm the top kills and all you guys are making us lose. And it's like, okay, you're the top kills by like one and you guys still lost. So I would, if I was to redo it today or for any aspiring hero shooter makers out there, I would actually downplay the team factor and try to put more focus on individual contribution. Because that's just how people play. They're selfish. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just that human nature they can't help.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “We would look up that person's account. I would do that all the time. I love looking up people's accounts and seeing what would happen. Losing streak, he had an eight-game winning streak before that. Was no post about how awesome is this and the human psychology doesn't allow for that. One of my hindsight regrets about Overwatch, and this is, I think we did the right thing in the moment. I wouldn't go back and redo it, but if I was making a hero shooter from scratch today, I would make it less team focused. And we put all of our eggs in you noticing if the team won or lost.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Like, they wanted to feel like it was close but then win. And you can't architect that. Like it's, you know, it's a zero-sum situation. So there's got to be winners and there's got to be losers. The other really core problem, and we would study this all the time when people would complain. You know, you see a Reddit post and somebody would say, I had a six-game losing streak. This is so fucked. It's the worst matchmaker ever.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “The matchmaking systems are some of the most complex design and engineering tasks you're ever going to tackle. And they're thankless. It's very hard to because I think most people, and they're not being disingenuous, like if you ask a gamer, what do you want? They're like, I just want a fair match. Like just make it even. And the reality, what they want is they want to match where they're slightly better than the other guy.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And watching Reinhardt's charge to their deaths is kind of hilarious. And it's what separates a great Rhine from a shitty one.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Reinhardt was actually my main. So I played the most of Reinhardt. That was another amazing Jeff Goodman design of this guy who just has a shield. As soon as you give somebody a shield, they know what to do. They go into protector mode. The shield was designed to shoot through And then he just has a giant rocket hammer, and he does a charge ability. It's really interesting where the charge ability came from. I was playing a ton of Left for Dead 2, and you could play in versus mode where you could be the enemy zombie guys, and there was an enemy boss zombie called the Charger. Who had that chargeability? And I thought the reason that ability was so cool is because it's a commit. Once you press the button, you're a runaway train.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “McCree. McCree is another, like, I'm somebody who's attracted to the simplicity in design. And I did not design McCree's six shooter. The way that gun feels is phenomenal. And to capture the spirit of that, we had a desire named Mike Heiberg designed the high noon ultimate. And then just all the Karen loved the team put in when he does the ultimate. We roll a tumbleweed across the screen like every time. It's a very simple hero, but the simplicity is what I like best in design. I'm not a fan of when somebody starts explaining in any of these games, whether they're mobas or hero shooters, and they start like, this guy throws orbs and he throws three orbs, and then he runs out of his orb bank, and then he can call the orbs back. ORI can cache the orb, and I'm just my head is spinning, and I'm like, just give me a fucking good gun”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “But just the fast movement, really epic over the top weapons, you have a low time to kill or TTK that players call it, meaning you're very survivable. You can take a few hits where in a game like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike if you get shot in the hedge, you're just dead right away. So it was supposed to be this explosive larger than life fun arcade shooter with a lot of teamwork involved.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah, our goal was to pay homage to the shooters before us that we loved. There's no way you can talk about Overwatch without talking about Team Force 2. Team Fortress started as a Quake mod, which was brilliant and I played tons of. Then there was Team Fortress Classic that came out with Half-Life One. And then Team Fortress 2, I think everything about it blew everybody away when it came out in 2007. And there's obviously just huge influence there. But the shooter mechanics of Overwatch are, they harken back to what people call the arcade or arena shooter genre, which pains me because I never back in the day, I didn't think of Quake as a arcade shooter. It's almost an insulting way of saying it.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “The OG, the cornerstone, you know, we put her on the front of the box. She was that moment of we should just take The best of the best, and we know this gameplay is good and solid, and it's so simple, like the mechanics are very easy to explain to somebody, it's very easy to pick up. The first time anybody hits recall for the first time, and they try to wrap their mind around like, wait, does that mean if I, you know, and they're mapping out the possibilities?”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Resist the urge to do the common, I call them the cargo container mazes that you see in every game. And I know why they exist. They're easy to make, but we kind of wanted Overwatch to be this world tour of great places that you'd want to go to. Or in the case of like Oasis, it's like, okay, maybe Iraq back when we were making this game wasn't the top of people's list, but what is the bright hopeful version of what that could look like? So we just really tried to sell this idea of these aspirational locations. One, just to get people thinking about different places on planet Earth and how awesome they all are, but also from like a pure game design standpoint, you're going to spend a lot of time in the environment. So the environment should be pleasing and not oppressive.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “You know, if there's going to be all this fighting, like it kind of has to be worth it for something. Picking the locations in the world was the funnest thing. You know, there's just a group of us who would sit around and like, where do you want to go? You know, Santorini looks amazing and you're looking at pictures and like, let's make that place. You know in a video game, people are going to spend hours and hours in a location.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “The process was a blast, and the goal was that bright, hopeful future and the other phrase we used all the time on the team was a future worth fighting for.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “We also knew that the timeframe we were given of two years, there was no way to create a compelling PVE experience. So we just kind of randomly put dates. In the slide of crawl walk run, thinking it was aspirational, and really we were just trying to save save ourselves, like don't cancel us. You know, this team can make something great. The other part that we had to talk to too was like a mobile strategy. Like at that time, it was like everything has to be also on mobile, which I think is the dumbest thing ever. And so literally, what we did is this was Jeremy's brilliant part. We had a picture with all the boxes. And then one of them is like a tablet with just a fucking photoshop of Arnold's art on it. And we're like, and also it'll be on mobile”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “And in that deck, because we had to speak to schedule, we had to speak to two things that were tough to speak to. One, we had to speak to schedule. And we came up with this concept of crawl walk run. We had identified the reason Titan failed is we just tried to run. We tried to come up with the next world of Warcraft. But if you think about World of Warcraft, It had Warcraft 1, 2, and 3 to build upon, to even get to the point where people gave a shit enough about that world to want to live in the world of warcraft. So, the idea was that instead of trying to cut right to World of Warcraft, let's try to honor Warcraft One, essentially. So this first game is just to establish that there's a universe you might give a shit about”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Besides dragging Arnold Sang's art, you know, desecrating it into my deck, we put together, we had this amazing game designer on the Overwatch team, a guy named Jeremy Craig, who's now actually game directing a game over at Bonfire. Jeremy, not only was he a great game designer, but he had the ability to sell things better than anybody else visually. So Jeremy took my shitty deck and then we had lots more like creative brainstorms and we thought through the game of Overwatch a lot more. And then he made this gorgeous pitch deck that we pitched. We first had to go through the blizzard production and game directors for them to approve it and give it their thumbs up. Then we had to go through the Blizzard executives. Then we had to go through Activision.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “So my deck was terrible. People actually, there's a thing called a Jeff deck, which is it's always gray with black writing and then the default PowerPoint blue shapes because I just don't bother making it look good.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “And just kept pushing towards that name. And the thing that got the most votes was Overwatch. Overwatch in Titan was like a police group, essentially. But somebody had written Overwatch on that board and it got the most votes. So I basically named the game Overwatch to high five my team and kind of middle finger.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Jeff, you cannot go into that meeting. I refuse to put up a deck in front of the team where the first slide says monetize shooter. They'll hate that, and that's not the spirit of who we are as creative developer. I'm like, yeah, you're right. Like, well, no one was supposed to see this deck anyway. You guys were all looking over my shoulder. And he's like, you need to put a name on it. I'm like, it's overwatch, like right on the spot. I said the name was Overwatch. And where that had come from was when we were working on Titan. I was really angry about this. We did this fake, I did not do this. Another leader on the team did this. This fake We're going to put up whiteboards and everyone gets to vote for their favorite name for Titan. But the person who did it already had a name in mind for the game.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “And then Ray tells me he's like, because we would every morning we get the team together because we were in this like dire, you know, dire straits and we're midway through at that point. And Ray and a producer named Matt Holly said, tomorrow morning at the meeting, you're going to pitch this monetized shooter idea. It was called monetized shooter because originally when I pitched it, it was free to play and you had to buy the heroes, which is fucking terrible. But at the time, I actually thought that was a good idea. I'm walking down the hall with Matt Holly to go pitch this to this group. We're supposed to be working on crossworlds and like, you got to pitch this idea to them. Matt Holly stops me in the hall and says”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “There were two co-leaders of that team four. There was, you know, Chris Metzen was there and Ray Gresco. And I remember Ray coming over. Ray is like a phenomenal game developer of all time. He wrote the Dark Forces engine, was the production director on Diablo 3. He and I killed Titan. And then he's at my desk looking over my shoulder and he's like, well, what are you working on? Is this the crossworlds pitch? And I'm like, no. And I show them the seven slides He just looks at me and he says. Go show Mets in this. This is what we should make instead. And then I went and I showed Metzon, like, hey, this is just an idea. And then Metson was like, yes. You know, like this is what we should make. And I showed Arnold and it was Arnold's art.”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yeah. Well, and it was funny because we were having these crossworld people are, you know, writing design docs and doing concept art for crossworld and, you know, we'd have some brainstorm meetings every day. And I put together, it was a seven page deck Overwatch deck, and it was called Monetize Shooter at the time. And it just said monetize shooter. And then the first slide was League of Legends plus Team Fortress 2 logos. And then I had like six heroes sloppily designed. And as everybody was working on Crossworlds,”

    2026-03-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #493 – Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source