Bobby Kotick wanted to hire a second team to develop Overwatch 2

Overwatch was notorious for its content drought in the years leading up to Overwatch 2’s launch in 2022. This was due to much of the team working on the sequel, but according to Schreier, Bobby Kotick, the ex-CEO who left the company in 2023, wanted to hire hundreds of people to lighten the load. Then-lead director Jeff Kaplan and producer Chacko Sonny were against this, which led to further complications in developing both games. Schreier’s full answer reads as follows:

“Yes – this is covered extensively in the book, but here’s the short version. Overwatch 1 was a huge success, and Bobby Kotick was thrilled about it. So thrilled, in fact, that he asked the board of directors to give Mike Morhaime a standing ovation during one meeting.

But following OW1‘s release, Team 4 began to run into a bit of a problem: they had too much work to do. They had to simultaneously: 1) keep making new stuff for OW1, which almost accidentally turned into a live-service game; 2) work on OW2, which was Jeff Kaplan’s baby and would have brought more players into the universe via PVE; and 3) help out with the ever-growing Overwatch League.

Kotick’s solution to this problem was to suggest that Team 4 hire more people. Hundreds more people, like his Call of Duty factory. 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.”