Team Liquid needed a home. A real home. Thanks to the technology and support of Alienware, it’s finally getting one.
That much was announced Tuesday at Dell’s launch event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Alienware co-founder Frank Azor, who runs Alienware, gaming, and XPS at Dell, unveiled the gaming company’s pact with Team Liquid on the new, 9,000-square-foot Los Angeles training center, which broke ground last year.
“If you believe esports — like I do — is gonna become the most popular sport in the world, then you need to take it to the next level in order for it to be able to do that. You need to help take the athletes themselves to a higher level so that they can compete to the level at which we see traditional sports today,” Azor said at CES. “The preparation and the training and the skills and the facilities that football and soccer and other professional sports athletes have at their disposal is something we’ve really never seen before in esports. But we’re about to change that.”
Team Liquid players and staff entering the facility will walk in to see a bar with 4K laser projector showing dozens of esports games and tournaments on a 120-inch screen, Steve Arhancet, Team Liquid’s co-owner and co-CEO, explained at Dell’s CES presentation. From there, the training center will feature conference rooms, “scrim,” or scrimmage, rooms, a cafeteria, and a space for Team Liquid’s production company 1 Up Studios.
The scrim rooms will closely represent tournament conditions for the League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) and CS:GO squads that Team Liquid sends into battle, according to the training center webpage. The Alienware Training Facility, once open later this month, will function as Team Liquid’s organizational base in North America.
“You’re playing for $25 million. There’s hundreds of millions of people watching these tournaments online. There’s a lot at stake,” Arhancet said. “You’re training, you’re committing, you’re sacrificing all of your personal relationships and your time to this game, to your team. And that means that we have to provide the right support structure.
“This is the first time that an esports organization in the Western world has separated residential living with a professional facility.”
Team Liquid League of Legends player Olleh was impressed by the facility in a tour he took recently.
Where does Alienware’s specialty come in? The company is providing Team Liquid with an advanced technical set-up. A server room will keep its Aurora gaming machines humming even while stressed to their maximum capabilities. These are technical considerations that couldn’t exist in a residential gaming house like the one Arhancet said used to be Team Liquid’s HQ of sorts.
“We started our partnership about six years ago, and when I think back to that time period, we were actually here in Vegas. We were in a residential house, we had a bunch of gamers squeezed into bedrooms, we had one live in the closet, and we’ve come so far to kind of keep up with the 350 million people who are watching us today,” Arhancet said.
The Alienware facilities — in Los Angeles, and soon, the Netherlands — will be home to Team Liquid’s 7o athletes, which Arhancet claimed is the largest esports contingent in the Western world. There, they’ll finally have a central place to train, meet, develop strategies, and take on the esports world.
“We have to develop a competitive advantage as Team Liquid to recruit and retain the best athletes in the world,” Arhancet said. “The only way we’re going to do that is by having a facility, building a winning culture — and that starts with our partnership with Alienware.”