Aceu reveals why he quit competing in Apex Legends
NRGNRG’s Brandon ‘Aceu’ Winn opened up about why he quit his Apex Legends pro career, revealing the disconnect he felt with the game as the competitive scene started to develop.
At the height of Aceu’s time in NRG’s Apex Legends squad, he played alongside Coby ‘dizzy’ Meadows and the two were highlight reel machines in almost every game they played.
The team wasn’t only dominant individually, but the players were starting to gain a lot of traction on Twitch and social media, making them huge names early in Apex Legends esports.
But the squad wouldn’t stay together for long: Dizzy had retired in late 2019, while Aceu stepped back from the pro scene soon after.
Timestamp at 14:00 for mobile viewers
At the time, there was a bunch of speculation for why Aceu quit, since his personal Twitch channel was booming, but he’s now opened up more about the saga that finally saw him retiring.
“At the beginning, it was just kill-races. It wasn’t actual competitive [matches.]” Aceu said. “I’ve never played battle royales competitively, so I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Then competitive started forming, and I started seeing what a competitive battle royale is, and that completely pushed me away.”
The streamer explained how quick he was to accept NRG’s offer to join the Apex team alongside close friend Dizzy. After getting dropped from his CS:GO team in early 2019, he made the switch to make ends meet.
via Mohr TwitterHowever, he explained that the change in Apex esports “definitely made me dislike the game and what I was doing at the time in it. So I was mentally checked out for a long time.”
But more tournaments started piling on and he couldn’t simply leave the NRG team. Aceu says he felt stuck; he didn’t want to leave an org like NRG but wasn’t enjoying competitive Apex Legends.
Eventually, in early April 2020, NRG and Aceu agreed to move him from the competitive roster to being a content creator, ending his career as an Apex Legends pro.