Frank Azor cofounded Alienware more than two decades ago, and so he had the look of a grizzled veteran at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles this week. As vice president and general manager of Gaming, Alienware, and XPS at Dell, Azor’s job is to lead the c…
Frank Azor cofounded Alienware more than two decades ago, and so he had the look of a grizzled veteran at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big game trade show in Los Angeles this week. As vice president and general manager of Gaming, Alienware, and XPS at Dell, Azor’s job is to lead the company’s efforts in making PCs and other products for gamers.
Azor got into the business when PC gaming machines were a tiny industry, and now they fuel a $32.9 billion global PC game software business. Alienware has become a trusted brand among gamers, and Azor has moved the company into branding and sponsorship partnerships with a number of esports companies, such as Team Liquid and ESL. In fact, Alienware became a full partner in helping Team Liquid create its esports training facility in Santa Monica, California.
Esports is exploding now, but Azor is remembering the lessons from a decade of sponsoring esports events. One of the lessons is to take advantage of technology, and it is doing so with Alienware Academy, which uses Tobii eye-tracking technology to evaluate where you are looking when you are playing a PC shooting game. It compares how fast you shoot and where you look to the best esports players. The data comparisons can be illuminating.
We talked about this at E3. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
Frank Azor: We’ve been sponsoring esports teams and events for 10 years now. It’s not that it’s gone bad, but now everyone’s sponsoring esports. We spent a lot of time brainstorming with Team Liquid around how we can add more value to what we bring to them, and also what they can bring to our customers. That’s where you saw the Team Liquid Alienware training facility emerge. The goal there was, can we build a professional training facility similar to what basketball and baseball athletes have? Were you there in March when we opened it?
GamesBeat: Before. They were still building it up.
Azor: You have a kitchen, a very well-designed nutrition plan for these guys. They work out every morning at 9AM. The separation of work versus their living environment has been a huge shift in mindset for them as well, a very good work-life balance tactic for them. I’d like to take full credit, but their performance in games since we built that training facility has been the best it’s ever been. They won the Miami League of Legends championship. They’ve come in second in basically every other major championship they’ve competed in.
In our opinion, they’re one of the most mature and professional teams in the world. They were an obvious partner for us to work with. We started working with them six or seven years ago. The way they think, their creativity, where they want to take the organization, it’s very similar in maturity and vision to us in gaming and Alienware, our history and where we want to take the business as well.
From an athletics perspective, building that training facility and partnering with them in that way, the dividends that it’s paid to them, it’s been phenomenal. That’s exactly what we wanted to do. But on the gamer side, we wanted to do some things that are unique as well to add value. Putting stickers and logos and stuff on jerseys, that’s been done for a decade now. What could we do that could help gamers benefit from our partnership with Liquid?
That’s where we came up with the Alienware Academy. How do we leverage the experience and the skill set that these guys have, which is the best in the world, and help them pass some of that on to the aspiring esports athlete? We created Academy to do that. It’ll be a curriculum. It’ll be administered by Team Liquid. We’ll use Tobii as a technology tool to help add more depth to the lesson plans and everything. It’ll be free to anyone who wants to participate. We hope that will add more value than just putting a logo on a jersey.
That’s where we’re at with esports right now. We also just signed on the Detroit Renegades. That’s kind of in its infancy as a partnership and a relationship, but they’re a new and emerging team. They’re owned by a professional athlete as well. They’re closely aligned with the NBA. That’s new and exciting for us. It’s emerging. We don’t know exactly where that league is going to go, but we want to help make it successful.
We see we add more value to that than just, “Here’s a bunch of notebooks and desktops. Put our logo on the jerseys.” We’re actively exploring how we can make their athletes better, and how they can add value to our aspiring customers and existing customers. We’re trying to figure out different things to do around that. We haven’t figured it all out yet, but we’re going to. With the Renegades, because they’re a smaller team, we’re able to take a lot of lessons learned from 10 years in esports and help ramp them up a lot faster than they would have without us.
GamesBeat: What seems different in the last year, besides maybe the sponsorships getting more expensive? What else is happening in this stage of things?
Azor: It’s interesting. The sponsorships aren’t necessarily getting more expensive. What we’re finding is that esports teams—you have your new esports teams, because there’s kind of a gold rush, and they all come out and say, “We’re the latest esports team or franchise or league! We want a ton of money!” We just say, “Guys, we’re past that now.” We bring value to the relationship, genuine tangible value and experience that can help you be a better league or a better team. We can do certain things beyond just giving you our money.
The mature teams come to us and say, “Hey, keep your money. We want more of the value add that you guys provide. We want you guys to help us fit out our gaming house. We want to build a training facility like you built for Liquid. We want to use your technology to do it. We want to take some best practices you’ve implemented and bring that to our team and our athletes.”
The whole thing is changing. At first, a team would go recruit the best players it could find out there. Now the players are in such demand that they choose where they want to go. A lot of factors play into that: location, facilities, technology, management team, teammates. All these variables are factoring into where an athlete decides to go. A team has to be more attractive today than it’s ever been before.
If you’re just taking your investor money and spending it on things that aren’t adding value to your team, or you’re taking sponsorship money and you’re not investing it in things that add value to your franchise and your team, you’ll have a very challenging time competing at the level that some of these more professionally managed, longer-term organizations are competing at. They come to an organization like Alienware and Dell and say, “Maybe we need some money to sustain us as a business, but we see you add a lot more value that other companies can’t.”
A consumables company is going to struggle to add a lot of value compared to a technology company like we are. Potato chips don’t necessarily make an athlete any better at their sport. If we can work together on a partnership where you’re going to be able to game on the most reliable computers out there—you can travel with them. They’re easy to set up and deploy. We’re going to have service and support available to you in every city and every country that you visit. If something goes wrong, we can dispatch spare parts immediately. Those are much more valuable than just getting a $500,000 check.
GamesBeat: Are you happy with the audience that you draw now, the eyeballs coming in?
Azor: Traffic is important, of course, but it’s not the most important metric. We’re more interested in engagement. My team’s not measured on how much traffic they get, how many eyeballs they get. We’re more interested in, are folks engaging in active conversations with us? Do they give us feedback on what we can improve, what they love about us, what they hate about us? Are they doing the quests on Alienware Arena? Do they care about being loyalty members? Are they enjoying the experience of Alienware and Dell Gaming? Those are the more interesting things we’re looking at.
I can drive traffic just like that.
