The director of Overwatch and one of the founding members, Jeff Kaplan, has left Blizzard Entertainment after almost 20 years.

In a personal statement by Jeff, he thanked the development team for their support and thanked the players for supporting the game.

Jeff Kaplan was someone who often interacted with the Overwatch community, especially through the Developer Update videos where he would explain the updates that were being implemented to the game and different game mechanics.

Blizzard has announced that Aaron Keller will be stepping in as the new Games Director. Aaron has been working in Blizzard for 18 years and is also one of the members involved with the Overwatch project from the start.

Aaron assures that the development of Overwatch 2 is going very well and more updates on the game will be announced in the future. “Speaking of Overwatch 2, development is continuing at a good pace. We have an exceptional vision we’re executing on, the reaction from many of you to the updates we shared at BlizzConline thrilled us, and we have exciting reveals planned for this year and beyond as we ramp to launch. We’ll be sharing more frequent updates about Overwatch 2 progress and new features in the live game with you all very soon.”  

However many of the community members are unsure of the future of Overwatch with the sudden departure of Jeff Kaplan, especially when the development of the sequel is underway.

Blizzard has been often criticized for their treatment of their employees, Overwatch also has received it’s fair share of criticism for having lootboxes present in the game where players purchase additional cosmetic items through real world currency, however this has largely become a norm where the same lootbox systems are making their way into single player story driven games.

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