Jeff Kaplan Says He Hasn't Played Overwatch Since Leaving Blizzard

The former Overwatch director left Blizzard in April 2021 and now makes The Legend of California, a Gold Rush survival shooter.

Jeff Kaplan hasn't played Overwatch in more than five years, and he has told the algorithms to quit recommending it. "I've literally not played the game since April 2021," the game's former director told GameSpot in an interview that Video Games Chronicle highlighted Friday. He left Blizzard that month after 19 years, and he says he skips the Overwatch subreddit and YouTube and doesn't search for the game.

He'd learned how hard a clean break can hit when he left World of Warcraft in 2008 for Titan, a project Blizzard later cancelled, so this time he made the separation almost clinical. He's still proud of what his team built, he said, but he won't relive it like the "Napoleon Dynamite" character who keeps rewatching tapes of his old football days: "I don't want to be Uncle Rico!"

His next game looks nothing like Overwatch. The Legend of California is an action-survival shooter set on a mythical Island of California during the Gold Rush, made by Kintsugiyama, the small independent studio Kaplan founded. He and teammate Tim Ford are streaming a playtest Saturday morning. "I'm onto this new thing, and that's where I'm at in my life," he told GameSpot.

Source: videogameschronicle.com, retrieved October 16, 2026. Other sources: gamespot.com, kintsugiyama.com, kintsugiyama.com (2), gameinformer.com.