New Call of Duty SBMM stats are a bitter pill for Apex Legends fans

Skill-based matchmaking, that old chestnut. Now more than ever, SBMM continues to divide opinions in the first-person shooter landscape.

It's been a long-time criticism of Call of Duty, and this was only heightened as a new rival, XDefiant, decided to scrap the system in non-competitive modes - which has been a revelation.

Now, Apex Legends fans are having a pop at Respawn Entertainment's usage of SBMM, as Call of Duty has now revealed how important the system is to its player retention rates.

Apex Legends want more CoD-like SBMM to retain players.

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For months now, Apex Legends has been in decline, reaching its lowest player count on Steam in three years, and player retention is key.

Off the back of Call of Duty's most recent blog post detailing how a secret SBMM nerf has been negatively impacting the player retention levels, Apex Legends players are eyeing a change.

"We would expect to see the player population erode rapidly in the span of a few months, resulting in a negative outcome for all our players," the Call of Duty team said.

Taking to Reddit, Apex Legends players are now pointing out how Call of Duty works, applauding the different stance it takes over Respawn.

Pointing out "All these factors strongly encourage the long-term health of the Call of Duty player base,
helping the title avoid the feedback loop of low-to-average skill players continually leaving
the game as the average skill of the population rises," Apex Legends fans claim this is why the severe player drop-off is occurring.

"[This is] 100% a phenomenon in any long living live service game. Developers should smartly be worried about it because it caps the lifespan of the game," one fan agreed on Reddit.

A second fan said, "Been saying this for 5 years... The game's learning curve is broken. The fact that you cannot study the maps 'offline' (or at least outside of live matches) is a huge problem."

Other gamers referenced older titles that didn't survive due to no SBMM, such as Quake, which is now a gauntlet in every casual playlist. "This is what happened to Quake. Log in to Quake Champions, and you're thrown in with PRO players in TDM on the regular lol. It's just wholly impenetrable to new players," another player added.

Of course, there are other factors to Apex Legends dying, as World Champion Phillip "ImperialHal" Dosen eyes less "boring ass characters" and more fun to the battle royale.