Shortly after switching over to content creation full-time following his retirement from professional Call of Duty, Seth “Scump” Abner is slowly beginning to explore games outside of his wheelhouse, despite some understandable trepidations.
On Jan. 25, the CoD legend announced he’d be doing a partnered stream to reveal a new Halo Infinite map created in the in-game Forge system alongside OpTic founder and longtime friend Hector “H3CZ” Rodriguez.
While Scump isn’t the only former OpTic CoD legend to move in Halo‘s direction (his longtime teammate in Matthew “FormaL” Piper moved to Halo at the beginning of 2022 and won a world championship later on), that’s not the only game he’s considering either.
On an earlier stream, Scump said that he’s “down to run some [VALORANT]” but admitted he’s a little hesitant to jump straight into other games, saying he wasn’t sure if people would watch him play. But he acknowledged in the same stream that he has got to “get out of the mindset” of being scared to venture out beyond CoD, which is easier said than done given he’s spent the past decade of his life solely dedicated to that title.
During that clip, 100T founder and former OpTic teammate Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag told Scump to “hold off” on playing VALORANT until a time when he would be comfortable going weeks without CoD. Nadeshot disagreed with Scump regarding the notion that people wouldn’t watch, putting him in the class of streaming stars like shroud and ensuring him that viewership would “slowly but surely go up.”
Last week, right after Scump announced his retirement, Nadeshot said the timing of the decision was “bizarre” given that both the player base and content around Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2 were declining.
Despite that, it’s clear that there are still plenty of opportunities for Scump to make CoD content that rakes in viewers. During the first set of online qualifier matches after his retirement, Scump’s watch party stream did better numbers than the actual CDL stream itself.
