Is it true that Kaplan is basically the whole reason we didn’t have this monetization system in OW1? I heard people say that he was the only reason we didn’t have a monetization system like this in the first. Does anyone know if this is true? I know he was creative director. Not sure if he had control over how the game was monetized though.
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I am sure he is still under NDA. Only he truly knows, do not believe the internets.
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Kaplan was also a director board for a long time. A big reason why OW launched as a GOTY was thanks to having the director being resistant to corporate insanity, which in turn meant most of the work they made was not thrown into garbage can every 6 months like what happened to PvE.
He kept the worst of AKB away from the OW team, that much we know, but he started losing ground to the e-sports golden egg goose obsessed corporate of ABK some years into OW.
I assume this ‘‘worst’’ includes insane monetization and P2W.
FFXIV is another game where the director is also a board member and that allows the game to be immune to corporate being obsessed monetization at all costs.
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It is not hard to read between the lines that he left when he felt his artistic vision for the game had become too compromised by corporate greed, but we don’t know any more than that explicitly. So sounds like the rumour mill exaggerating that tbh.
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I feel like I remember hearing “We don’t want people to buy the game and then have to buy skins for their favorite heroes. We’ll let them earn them” in an interview at one point in time.
Might not have been Jeff, but I’m certain I remember that line of thought being talked about.
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seems so obvious i would surprised if thats not the case. i was angry with jeff when the game was on a drought content after 2019 but he was a real hero and i never saw it until was too late, now aaron keler and the other blonde dude with glasses are the cancer of the game, they will kill it
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There probably are only two people who can answer those questions with certainty: Jeff Kaplan and Robert Kotick. I doubt either of them will answer here.
Anyway: “Papa Jeff” always was a meme-ish figure in the Overwatch world. As much as I like to romanticize myself, he’d probably be the first one to misdirect and dodge any absolute statements himself. His Vlogs always had a positive but slightly “Riddler-ish” vibe trying not to be too definitive. I bet you can still find them on youtube and try to get a feel for it yourself.
WE as in “the Overwatch community” have NO CLUE what actually happened behind the scenes, and if and how Jeff Kaplan may have been involved. We know he quit right around the time the “Cosby suite” scandal went through the press. That’s ALL we know, really, he kept his goodbye letter short and as someone mentioned probably was and still is under NDA so we will probably never hear the “full” story.
I do not want to suggest anything, however romanticizing pro this or that Dev and against this or that other is simply extremely problematic given the fact we ALL lack information.
It’s just logic. Overwatch 2 became F2P, every big free game goes through the same monetization system, battle pass, shop skins, and a way to get coins so you can get a shop skin once every 1000 years. It’s like that and always has been, Overwatch 1 was paid so there was no need for such system because Blizzard was generating money that way but companies slowly begins to realize going into F2P and with a monetization system like this one is the best way to gain the most profit.
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im not stupid, im not going to be part of the papa jeff thing, a lot of bad decisions happened when he was the director, the drought started with him in charge, he as director could do something to not let ow1 die the way it did. but maybe is true he left when he realized the direction ow2 was going, as far as we know he really wanted to make a good game, or not, he just give up, we will never know
At the end of the day he was working for Robert “Bobby” Kotick, and with him having a vision to have his own Sports League thing (OWL) as the main focus I highly doubt that Jeff Kaplan had the influence you make it sound he had.
I don’t know, neither pro or contra Jeff Kaplan. I consider him a pretty sympathetic speaker, but can only speculate about the person and intentions behind the “face of the company” that he became for some years.
This, very much.
Kaplan literally left 3 months before all the sexual assault and harassment scandals broke.
Jeff was old guard. He’d been there since the early days and as much as I love the guy there’s no way he didn’t turn a blind eye to it. It’s just not possible. You don’t spend 20 years in Blizzard and not know about it. I spent 1 there and it was blatant.
He didn’t want to sit in interviews and get asked questions about it so he ducked out before the crap hit the fan. He didn’t wanna deal with the fallout so he had to walk away from Overwatch. Was he probably defending OW from predatory developers/monetization? Yes. Is he a saint? No.
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Man Yoshi P is god, they told him to fix that game and man did he ever turn it around.
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A. Why do you care?
And B. I don’t know, who cares?
Kaplan was the reason for the whole PvE mess, he wanted to redo his failed Titan project on a successful PvP game.
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In 2016, and the years before that (during their development phases), were there any real examples of successful F2P games that aren’t mobile platforms? I’m not familiar with it. I assume they were not willing to do something like that either.
Early OW even in the first 2-3 years, certainly didn’t have the content that I would think would be adequate for a modern F2P + Battle Pass monetization model. I guess we’re technically not that far off but I can’t imagine them wanting to do that over RNG loot boxes.
Granted, people did argue and debate the loot boxes very early on and they got banned or restricted in other places. It was pretty rough at first but at least they added duplicate checks and weighted to getting event-items and such, so that made them one of the more fairer systems but they weren’t seeing any growth from what I remember reading.
From what I understand, they wanted to complete OW1 and then work on a sequel, a full campaign thing. I think then mistake was promising a live service. That made them overcommit and split their development.
From all the interviews and articles after the PVE drama, I read they had planned about 2 years of content and that was it. They were already working on the sequel as early as 2018, if not earlier pre-production phases. So, probably just bad communication and overpromises making commitments to things they had no plans for in the long run or couldn’t sustain.
I wouldn’t necessarily blame one man on that, this seems like a team upper management thing and hard lessons learned in hindsight. Of course there was word of the higher ups were getting involved, meddling, and forcing them to release something asap so they decoupled the project. The PVE wasn’t working out, or not the way someone wanted to make more money, and so they forced it to be a seasonal thing. (I personally like to think the OWL and higher ups wanted to get some traction into the game again and distract the public from other issues).
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Lots of the people who used to work under him are quoted as saying he constantly protected them from toxic workplace culture as well as fought for the game to be a game and not a profit machine.
He was a major force who fought to “transfer” our cosmetics to the new OW and was behind changing the old lootbox system to be as charitable as it was with consistent currency drops and changing dupes so they weren’t as frequent and wouldn’t happen unless you had already unlocked everything of that rarity.
Beyond what we know of what WAS talked about, nobody knows whether it was the decision to go full on aggressive BP and hardline cash only cosmetics that made him leave or how much he was against it.
Jeff was no saint, but by all accounts he was a gamer first and not a profit hound.
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I don’t know why they keep lying about this because the current mtx store wouldn’t be popular til two or three years after release
No, Lootboxes were the current popular trend back in 2016 and was seen as super egregious as the store is now.
Like if you have to keep making unsubstantiated positives about the guy he probably wasn’t a good person. Kaplan even in the early 2000s was very aware of the internet and kept as little info on the net as possible, you will literally never hear anything about him that wasn’t heresay
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To add more context the specific people suing for sexual harrasment he was the VP of, so not only should he have been very aware of it, he also didn’t do a thing about it and likely protected his “friends” considering one of the perpetrators he did say he was friends with at the time, I forget who now
Kinda not really comparable. Naoki Yoshida was given free reign on FFXIV because he had prior experience working on their other, more successful MMO and the company was desperate to recoup losses after 13 and 14 1.0 nearly killed the company. He got his board position because he saved the game and the company and made it the most profitable IP SE has.
You can hypothesize all you’d like, but let’s be realistic.
Overwatch 1’s launch and profit mechanics were built around the popular systems at the time those being:
- Sale of the title itself
- Loot boxes
Direct sales were gaining popularity at the time, alongside the F2P archetype, but they weren’t at the industry powerhouse they are now.
You can speculate about the barriers in place that “prevented” it, but realistically speaking OW1’s approach worked best at the time it released whereas OW2’s approach fits the current industry standards better.
Also bear in mind that there are examples of mechanics that were ahead of their time over the course of gaming’s history that are in use now, but didn’t quite make the cut when they were released:
- Trespasser’s “VR” gameplay and physics interactions
- Halo 4’s Spartan Ops (live service episodic model)
- Borderlands 2’s Skin Packs
Same could be said about sales tactics.
Occam’s razor favors the simpler path, let’s not overcomplicate what’s come to pass.
OW1 most likely did generate money up through year 2, at a petering off rate, and most likely fell off through year 3 and nose dived after for the next 3 years.
When a game is no longer profitable, changes are often made. Sometimes in the form of new content making the game relevant and popular again (generating profit) or by introducing a new game into the franchise.
You can chalk the change up to greed, but realistically the game was stagnant content wise as well as profit wise (at best, and at worst operating at a profit loss) for years before OW2.
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