Former Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan says he has cut himself off from the hero shooter almost completely, and he is doing it on purpose. In a new interview published on October 14, 2026, Kaplan explained that he no longer visits Overwatch subreddits, watches videos about the game or searches for his own name, describing the distance as something he keeps “for my own psyche.”
He has not played Overwatch since April 2021, the same month he left Blizzard after nearly two decades at the company.
Why Kaplan stays away from Overwatch
Kaplan described his break from the game as an “almost clinical separation.” He even told platform algorithms that he is not interested in Overwatch, so the game stays out of his feeds entirely. Fading into the background after his exit, he said, was “very soothing to my soul.”
The approach comes from experience. Before Overwatch, Kaplan spent years on World of Warcraft, and he said leaving WoW actually hurt more than leaving Overwatch, because he went into the second exit prepared. In his view, Overwatch now belongs to the current team, the players and Blizzard. He joked that he has no interest in becoming Uncle Rico, the Napoleon Dynamite character who cannot stop reliving his glory days.
None of this comes from bad blood with the game itself. Kaplan still talks about Overwatch with pride and says he holds his former colleagues in the highest regard.
Plenty has changed since he walked away. Aaron Keller took over as game director, Blizzard dropped the “2” from the title earlier this year as part of a story-driven relaunch, and new heroes keep arriving at a steady pace. How those changes land with PC players shows up in the Overwatch Steam player count and peak player data, which tracks the hero shooter season by season.
The ultimatum that ended his Blizzard career
Kaplan’s distance makes more sense once you look at how his time at Blizzard ended. In a long interview with Lex Fridman earlier this year, he said Activision Blizzard’s CFO called him in and told him Overwatch had to hit a set revenue target in 2020. If it missed, around 1,000 people would be laid off, and the blame would land on him.
Kaplan called it the biggest “f**k you” moment of his career. Up to that point, he said, he expected to retire at Blizzard. After that meeting, he decided he was done.
What Kaplan is working on now
These days, Kaplan runs Kintsugiyama, a fully remote indie studio he co-founded with former Overwatch gameplay engineer Tim Ford. The 33-person team is building The Legend of California, a multiplayer action-survival shooter set in a fictional, gold rush era version of California.
Players gather, craft, hunt and fight across an open frontier, build up a ranch and team up in companies of up to four. The Legend of California Epic Games Store page still lists the game as coming soon to Early Access, but Kaplan says the team has pushed its beta and early access targets into 2027. Recent alpha tests went from around 30 to 100 players per server.
Kaplan also admitted indie life has been humbling. Some people in the industry no longer return his emails, and he described the move as starting over “at the bottom of the mountain.” For a developer who once fronted one of the biggest games in the world, a quieter life away from Overwatch chatter seems to be exactly the point.
