I pulled that number out of my bootyhole because I knew it was a safe bet for a stable ELO.
US Chess Federation uses 25 games as your provisional ELO stage, many video games will use 10 matches. Assuming a large enough variety of ELO in the player base, you can be confident your ELO is mostly accurate after a shockingly small number of matches.
Would be interesting to see but I would assume most people won’t even make it to 10 matches in a game they don’t enjoy. The people who spend thousands of hours on a single game are a tiny minority of the tiny minority of people who have the free time to play dozens of a hours a week.
If you can’t make it 10 matches in a new game, I don’t think SBMM is your problem with the game.
10 matches should be like, between 3-10 hours. Assuming an hour a night, you’ll be approximately ranked for SBMM within a week.
Do you understand why people play games though?
Warcraft 3 multiplayer was peak “matchmaking” in my opinion, where people created lobbies with certain rule sets and anyone who was interested in that type of game could just join directly. It was a blast, playing lots of different game modes all the time and meeting a wide range of player types, instead of having to invest an insane amount of time (3-10 hours, vs less than a minute to find a game in WC3) into one single game mode even before you can actually start playing.
What you have described is exactly what I was talking about when I called it “playing the game like a job,” where you have to invest plenty of time before you can even hope to enjoy it.
