Activision Blizzard reportedly clashed with the Overwatch team on how to cope with the hero shooter's swelling demands like OW2, pushed for "hundreds" of hires to be more Call of Duty-like

Sep. 30, 2024

Not everyone loved that

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

FormerActivision BlizzardCEO Bobby Kotick reportedly pushed theOverwatchteam to deal with a swelling workload born of success by borrowing a page from Call of Duty’s book – staffing up to have separate teams working on separate series entries.

That comes from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who is currently teasing tidbits of his new book,Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment.On a popularWorld of Warcraft subreddit, Schreier answers a question about what exactly happened on the Overwatch team, with several leads, likeBlizzard vice president and game director Jeff Kaplan, leaving in a relatively short space of time.

You’ll have to buy the book for the long version, but the short version is that success meant the team swiftly found itself with too much to do. Alongside running the game, developers had to work on a sequel and help run the blossoming Overwatch league. How to best navigate that, though, apparently wasn’t something everyone agreed on.

“Kotick’s solution to this problem was to suggest that Team 4 hire more people. Hundreds more people, like his Call of Duty factory,” Schreier says. “And start a second team to work on OW2 while the old team works on OW1 (or vice versa).

“Kaplan and Chacko Sonny were resistant to this, because they believed pretty strongly in the culture they’d built (more people can sometimes lead to more problems and less efficient development), and it led to all sorts of problems as the years went on.”

The rest, of course, is history. Overwatch 2 eventually released to replace the original, many of thePvE ideas have since been scaled back, and theOverwatch League has essentially been cannedas Blizzard decides what to do next. That theme has continued from launch, with various new ideas overmonetizationandgameplayslowly reverting to what they once were. It remains to be seen what’s next for the hero shooter, thoughit appears a Netflix project isn’t on the cards – at least, not anymore.

Desperate to get another RTS off the ground, Blizzard developers reportedly pitched Warcraft 4 and a Call of Duty RTS that got shot down.

Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter

Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more

Iain joins the GamesRadar team as Deputy News Editor following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When not helping Ali run the news team, he can be found digging into communities for stories – the sillier the better. When he isn’t pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new hat, you’ll find him amassing an army of Pokemon plushies.

A month after approving free versions of Unreal games that “started it all,” Fortnite creator Epic shouts out a group of fan devs “for their continued support in keeping the legacy alive”

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 makes headshots deadlier while cutting back on weapon sway and recoil: “We will be keeping a close eye on sniper balance after this change”

As if The Outlast Trials couldn’t get any more deranged, the horror co-op game’s big new update adds more tooth guns and lady who lives in the walls