Call of Duty legend Scump thoroughly enjoys hosting watch parties and streaming Ranked Play, but cheating concerns and performance issues even have one of the franchise’s most passionate advocates questioning their loyalty.
Content creators solely focusing on CoD are dropping like flies as they abandon ship and try out new games. On December 17, Nadeshot revealed that he was stepping back from streaming Black Ops 6, blaming ‘sh*t’ network performance and cheaters ruining Ranked Play as the reason why.
Professional Warzone competitor Swagg also announced that he would be streaming Marvel Rivals instead because he couldn’t queue into a match due to all the issues.
And it’s not just streamers departing. Steam player count doesn’t tell the whole story, but BO6 went from gaining 148,000 payers between October and November to losing 145,000 concurrent players in December.
Meanwhile, Warzone lost over 102,000 players, or 32.6% of its player base on Steam in December.
Scump isn’t ready to lose hope, but that faith is dwindling.
Scump calls the current state of Call of Duty ‘depressing’
Scump on the state of Call of Duty: "I don’t think Call of Duty has ever been in a worse spot than it is right now. It’s kind of depressing, to be honest."pic.twitter.com/udXXiCeJsL
— CharlieIntel (@charlieINTEL) January 8, 2025
“Call of Duty is just in such a bad spot right now,” Scump claimed. “I don’t think Call of Duty has ever been in a worse spot than it is right now. It’s kind of depressing, to be honest ”
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As to what went wrong, Scump pointed to the devs releasing Ranked Play too early. In years past, Treyarch waited until three or four months after the game was released to build up anticipation and iron out the map and weapon pool, but the game mode this year launched just under a month later.
“They dropped it (Ranked Play) so early, and it was so bad because of all the hackers,” Scump explained. “Ranked Play itself isn’t bad… I think the system could be better, but it’s fine. The problem is the cheaters.”
Scump will still be streaming watch parties when the CDL returns this week and tuning into Shottzy for OpTic scrims, but don’t expect the same level of CoD output.
“I’m not going to be not playing CoD at all, we are just going to be switching things up a little bit more and be a little more free with what I want to do on stream.”
For more, check out xQc’s take on why CoD is struggling.