Excuse my question of it’s stupid but how’s it better business wise? You’re killing the casual play like that when you already have a ranked mode in your game. Straight up stupid if you ask me
In games like Apex which rely on Microtransactions, you can kind of write off the people that end up in higher ranks anyway.
Most of your player base will be far behind those obviously and if you introduce SBMM, you kind of group more or less equally skilled players together so the chance that one team ends up significantly better than all other teams because they ended up having one of those top-tier players drops drastically (smurfs obviously still exist), which in turn increases the chance that player will have a feeling of "enjoying" the game since they statistically will be more likely to kill other players and/or win games when only playing in skill ranges around their own instead of having possibly players from all skill-tiers roaming the map. So those players are more likely to keep playing the game.
What we call "casual play" is most certainly already "enthusiasm play". I mean I can recount more than 1 occasion where friends didn't want to play Halo against me because back then I was the best from our group of friends and would crush them even 4 on 1. They said that's "unfair", so they rather played that game without me because they felt that they had better chances to win games if they could make sure I wasn't one of their opponents and thus didn't get discouraged by losing as much as they would be if I would have won.
TL;DR I guess it's mostly psychology for the casual and average player that when they know they only play against equally skilled players, they rate the amount of joy they get higher.
Nevertheless, i will force them to play with me
