The timing of Call of Duty icon Seth “Scump” Abner’s retirement certainly caught most of the community off guard, with the face of OpTic unexpectedly departing about a quarter of the way into what was supposed to be a complete final competitive season.
Another former CoD great in 100 Thieves founder and former OpTic teammate Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag also believes the timing of Scump’s decision was “bizarre,” not because of the point of time in the 2023 CDL season but rather because of the state of Warzone 2 and Call of Duty as a whole when it comes to its player base and current content performance.
“If I’m being very critical, it is a very bizarre time for him to step into content full time,” Nadeshot said to Jack “CouRage” Dunlop on The CouRage and Nadeshot Show. “Because this is probably the first iteration of the Call of Duty life cycle in the last three years, since the release of Warzone 1, where Call of Duty viewership is at probably the lowest it’s been in quite some time.”
Nadeshot also claimed that “a lot of full-time Call of Duty creators are tweeting as if it’s the apocalypse” and said that if he had the “raw talent” of Scump, he “probably would have competed longer.”
Over the past couple of months, since the release of Warzone 2, there’s been a conversation around the community about a declining player base. MW2/Warzone 2 posted an average of 223,897 players in November with a peak of 488,897 players, according to SteamCharts, during the month Warzone 2 was released. Across December, those numbers dropped to an average of over 178,000 and a peak of just over 308,000, and over the past 30 days, the average has only been 125,000 with a peak of 190,000.
The game is still a top performer according to SteamCharts, but while other games in the top 10 have seen consistent player numbers, MW2 and Warzone 2’s numbers have steadily gone down over the past month.
Call of Duty news site CharlieIntel tweeted last week that it heard from “multiple people” that Warzone 2’s player count is dropping “at a higher rate than expected.”
On top of all this, the spike in returning players that typically occurs with a new season will happen later than originally anticipated with CoD confirming that season two will be pushed back to a Feb. 15 launch.
