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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
Bobby Kotick's attempt to implement Call of Duty's production model on Overwatch by increasing staff and creating separate teams for different projects led to friction and ultimately, the decline of the Overwatch League and scaled-back PvE content in Overwatch 2.
Former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick reportedly pushed the Overwatch team 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 popular World of Warcraft subreddit, Schreier answers a question about what exactly happened on the Overwatch team, with several leads, like Blizzard 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 the PvE ideas have since been scaled back, and the Overwatch League has essentially been canned as Blizzard decides what to do next. That theme has continued from launch, with various new ideas over monetization and gameplay slowly reverting to what they once were. It remains to be seen what's next for the hero shooter, though it appears a Netflix project isn't on the cards – at least, not anymore.