Lex Fridman’s Tell-All Interview With Jeff Kaplan Was Missing Some Important Questions

Overwatch’s original game director, Jeff Kaplan, returned to the internet following his exit from Blizzard back in 2021 by doing an interview with Lex Fridman, who previously had other figures from the game industry on his podcast. Jeff and Lex’s conversation lasted a whopping 5:10:12, enough to spawn dozens of articles with lurid headlines, but apparently not enough to address the massive elephant that was sitting in the middle of the studio.

“Jeff, from the Overwatch team”, as most know him, spent 19 years at Blizzard Entertainment, the entirety of his career in video games until 2021. It wasn’t surprising that the majority of the interview was about his time at the video game giant, but how did they manage to avoid addressing the biggest Blizzard-related news in the past decade? Here is the problem with the Fridman interview and with Kaplan’s outlook on Blizzard in this new era of his career.

As he describes in the first fifth of the Fridman interview, Kaplan got hired at Blizzard in May of 2002. He started off as part of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos’ Quality Assurance team, but quickly joined World of Warcraft as one of its first two quest designers. He became WoW’s game director by 2008, and left the project to lead TITAN, the FPS MMO that would later become Overwatch, in 2009.

Between 2008 and 2021, Kaplan held a notable position of leadership in Blizzard Entertainment. He left the company in April of 2021 and, just a few months later, Bloomberg Law reported on the lawsuit filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Jeff Kaplan has never publicly commented on the lawsuit, which was understandable given the fact that his name does not appear in the lawsuit and that he was likely under NDAs, but the Lex Fridman interview should’ve changed that.

While he most likely remains under some NDA, Jeff Kaplan commented on multiple dramas at Blizzard, including the biggest story that came out of the interview and the reason why he left the company: a CFO (which is no longer at Blizzard) told him that if Overwatch didn’t make a specific sum of revenue, they were “going to lay off 1000 people, and that’s going to be on you.”

So why is it that he didn’t address the multimillion-dollar lawsuit at all? Furthermore, how did Lex Fridman, who did his research all the way back to Jeff’s EverQuest days as “Tigole”, overlook what is the biggest scandal in Blizzard history?

Kaplan was never named by any victims and, by all accounts, Team 4 (the team behind TITAN and then Overwatch) had little to no issues. He did directly worked with the key defendants named in the lawsuit. Alex Afrasiabi, one of the developers most named in the lawsuit, began his career at Blizzard in 2004 as a Quest Designer for World of Warcraft, presumably working alongside or under Kaplan.

Afrasiabi was credited as the Lead Quest Designer for Burning Crusade and Lead World Designer for Wrath of the Lich King, the two last expansions that Jeff Kaplan shipped as a World of Warcraft Designer. Even if Jeff had nothing to do with any of the accusations in the lawsuit, he at least had previously had a close working relationship with some of the people named in it. What’s more, at the time of his departure from Blizzard, Kaplan had reached the position of Vice President of Blizzard, making him a high-profile executive mere months before the biggest scandal in the company's history broke publicly.

While Jeff Kaplan’s optimism and overall good spirits are welcome in this time of turmoil in the games industry— I genuinely love the fact that he cannot stop praising the individual persons behind each certain systems in World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and now The Legend of California—, the reverie with which he still addresses Blizzard gets inevitably tinged by the unaddressed lawsuit.

“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.”

It is not reasonable to expect Kaplan to be even remotely unbiased when addressing Blizzard, the company which was his entire career for 19 years. And I am genuinely glad that he highlights the importance of individuals and creatives as the most crucial pieces of a game development team, but the silence on this topic is deafening.

Blizzard settled the lawsuit in December of 2023 by paying around $54 million USD. Since then, a lot of people were fired, the company underwent massive changes, and we haven’t heard anything regarding discrimination, poor working conditions, or sexual harassment. 

All signs point to Blizzard having addressed most of its issues, so I do understand why Kaplan focuses on the positives, but the only way we learn from the past is by acknowledging it. The fact that Kaplan spoke with Fridman for five hours in a comprehensive “tell-all” regarding his career, and did not address the biggest scandal that happened at Blizzard while he was still there, feels nefarious, even if it isn’t.

It is also worth noting that even the game Overwatch itself had to reckon with this scandal in a very real way. Infamously, the playable character McCree, named after a developer accused of multiple accounts of harassment, got an in-universe name change to Cassidy. It was a sobering moment of self-reflection for the community and team, so it seems odd not to discuss such a topic with the game’s lead creative who oversaw the character’s creation.

Kaplan’s “ biggest fuck you moment” may well have been a scummy CEO placing 1000 jobs on his shoulders, but not all were so lucky. Kerri Moynihan committed suicide at a company retreat in 2017 after colleagues shared a picture of her genitalia. This awful event happened during the same period that Kaplan was an executive at the company, and that cannot be overlooked.  Praise the people and highlight the talented individuals who have worked there over the years, but please do not romanticize Blizzard as a company while glossing over its previous atrocities.