Former Overwatch director and one of Blizzard's most well-known developers, Jeff Kaplan, has been in the news a lot recently. Part of that stems from an interview he did where he shared a significant event at Blizzard that was emotionally destructive for him, saying "it broke me," and played a huge role in his departure from the company. The other is the fact that he's making a new game called The Legend of California.
As part of the latter point, Kaplan and his co-founder, Tim Ford, showed themselves playing the game together for 10 hours in a livestream. It's about as extensive as an early look as you're going to get from any unreleased game, but it's not all that was shared during the long play session.
Close to the nine-hour mark of the livestream, when answering questions about the game, Kaplan began to share his views on a current element of today's video game industry, which includes a loud minority of players who, as Kaplan sees it, get angry at games they never intend to play.
"As a game developer, you can't make a game for every single player that they all want to participate [in]. Some people just won't want to play this. There's a lot of like, weird anger from the Overwatch community about this game. Some of them are in love with it; it's like a Venn diagram. There's people who are like, 'I love that game [Overwatch] but I also love what Kintsugiyama is trying to do' and then there are some of these people who are like, 'I don't want to play that game,' and I'm like, yeah, then just don't play it. That's cool. No one's putting a gun to your head to play the game. You do you."
"Just play the game that makes you happy. The weird 'I gotta nerd-rage out' because that's what the internet has trained me to do...I'll talk about my view on nerd-rage. Let's say I'm playing a game, and it has Paladins and Warlocks, and I play a Paladin, and they nerf the Paladin, and I get a little upset and I voice my opinion because I so love this game, and I'm bummed that my Paladin is nerfed. I can kind of understand that a little bit. I'll never understand being hostile about it or being rude about it, but I understand being upset. I understand voicing your opinon. But if a game comes out and you don't want to play it, and you've never played it, shut the f**k up, no one cares. We don't need to hear that you aren't into it, what is with this 'Oh my god, I'm so upset, they decided to make this game that I have no interest in.'"
"Who cares about my opinion if I'm not going to play it, and if I've never played it? Why does my opinion matter on that."
Kaplan also goes on to say what those kinds of messages online do for him, as a game developer, and particularly as someone who has been a director, with the access and power to change the things that people with uninformed rage and opinions are mad about. "As a game developer whose been in charge of teams, who has the ability to do something about it, I just f**king ignore you. That's all you've accomplished...You're so off the deep end, it's not even worth listening to you."
Ford adds, "It's not impressive, it's not difficult to shit on something," and Kaplan concludes by saying that while he might "get in trouble" for his comments, he's at the point in his career where he does not care about that kind of internet rage anymore.
Jeff Kaplan and Tim Ford have been making video games for a long time, and they've both felt the brunt of a lot of understandable and more often less-understandable outrage from players. They're also not wrong, that an unfortunate reality of video game discourse online is filled with people who amount to nothing more than tourists and grifters, who get angry for nothing beyond getting "the most upvotes," is the example Kaplan gives, but on other platforms like X (formerly Twitter), where higher engagement can be monetized, it also means people are pretending to be angry for money.
It's all a big grift, and while that individual might be angry for nothing other than cash and online notoriety, the end result is the spreading of more negativity and hatred that can unfortunately spread farther than it should. That's why it's always best to be wary of anyone who consistently shares nothing but negative opinions, no matter the game, when talking about the video game industry.
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