Alienware Co-Founder Frank Azor On Women In Gaming & Secret Behind Success Of The Gaming Icon

If I can tweak the memorable Sunday Times line associated with JRR Tolkien's fantasy epic The Lord of The Rings: the world of gaming is divided into those who know about Alienware and those who are going to. And Frank Azor is as close to Tolkien himself in this analogy.

Founded in 1996, Alienware has been in existence long before the term "Gaming PCs" became fashionable. Right from its inception, Alienware pushed the boundaries of what a PC stood for, and look awesome and attractive while doing it -- something that set it apart and laid the foundation of a rich legacy that continues to this day.

As co-founder and employee number four, Frank Azor lives and breathes Alienware. For the last 22 years as Mr Alienware himself, he's been instrumental in everything the gaming world loves and hates about this iconic brand.

frank azor

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As part of Dell, Alienware's gaming business generates $3 billion of revenue -- by far the greatest among PC gaming hardware manufacturers -- where Azor is the Vice President and General Manager of Alienware, Dell XPS and G-Series devices.

On the sideline of CES 2019, earlier this month, I got a chance to sit down and have a chat with Frank Azor. We spoke about women in gaming, making Alienware more inclusive, and the secret of its success. Following is a brief excerpt of our conversation.

Q) Alienware Legend is a new design direction for the brand. Why now? Where is this coming from and what does it signify?

It's a big transformation for us. But what you'll see with every Legend design product is a very different design direction. And that design direction came from the fact that the gamer has changed considerably.

Alienware Area 51m with new Legend design

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Today we have a significant female gaming community, but up to now just about every gaming product that's been designed has been primarily targeted towards a male demographic, we wanted to change that with Legend. So if you look at the look of it, it's not softened up necessarily in that it's more unisex friendly, but between the color combinations and the way in which we're integrating the lighting effects. And the design tested much more favourably with female gamer audience than any of the previous designs we had done. And that was on purpose, since the gamer has evolved considerably over time.

Also right now pretty much all gaming products are very, very similar. And we were the ones that initially kind of stood out by creating these far out looking computers. So we had to figure out how are we going to stand out from an industry that's iterated and imitated Alienware for 20 years.

Q) Did Alienware Legend have any significant female contribution?

Absolutely. A lot of the design staff that worked on it were women. For Alienware Legend, we did almost 100 different iterations of designs that we were going through and testing with our own research internally. We have a ton of female gamers on our own staff. So Anna Maree, she's the one who predominantly streams for us. My entire game partnership team is led by Claudina Lopez, and she's been with me for 15 years or so.

Anna Maree, Alienware Streamer

And all these individuals, of course, play a role by giving us input around what do we think we're doing right. What are we, where we need to improve, what are we doing wrong. Obviously, you're not going to create one design that appeals to everybody, and especially Alienware. We want to be polarizing, and we want people to say, I love that. Or I hate that.

Q) Thoughts on Intel launching their own graphics card very soon. Should NVIDIA and AMD be worried?

Having the number of gaming products come into the gaming market, as we've had in recent years has made this the best time to be a gamer ever, you know. Twenty years ago there were just a handful of gaming systems and gaming technologies available out there. And it was tough to be a gamer, it was expensive. You didn't exactly have gaming keyboards, gaming mice, gaming monitors, it was tough.

Today, there's a broad spectrum of choices available to you at all types of price points, so more solutions in the graphic space is going to only help gamers. So we embrace the added option of having Intel graphics come into the picture. That's great.

The challenge of besting NVIDIA and AMD's gaming performance is enormous. And it's not my expectation that that's going to happen immediately with the Intel GPU. My expectation is that Intel will come in with a good product, and it will serve its place in the market. I don't think they will best an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti graphics card. I think if anybody has that expectation, they're going to be disappointed. If Intel does it, that'll be amazing. But I don't think that's reasonable. I mean Intel is an extremely capable company that I'm sure will produce some really good product. But I think it's unrealistic to think that they're going to best the likes of NVIDIA or AMD immediately.

Frank Azor, Alienware

Q) What does the Alienware Area 51m stand for? Do you actually expect it to sell well?

No, it's not going to move numbers. I mean, honestly, the Area 51m will sell, it's going to be a good product, and we hope to support it for a long time. But this is not a system that will sell millions of units. It's expensive and the value proposition of it appeals to the most discerning performance centric enthusiasts out there.

We build products like Area 51m because number one, it's fun. Number two, it's what people expect from us, they expect the best and if we stop delivering then we're not meeting expectations. And that's extremely important to us. And number three, I mean it's what we started doing and why we started doing this in the first place.

Q) How does Alienware plan to attract more gamers going forward and continue building on the last two decades of success?

It's a great question. A lot of folks are looking at the gaming industry today and they're saying, "How do I go get my piece of that pie?" There's money to be made in gaming, let me go build notebooks and keyboards and mice and this and that.

We've helped build this (the gaming market) to what it is today. When we started, the gaming market wasn't even considered a market, it was considered a use case on the PC. And we've helped contribute to and participate in the incredible boom, that is the gaming market today. We've done that by focusing on growing the gaming market. And that being one of our principal focuses as we grow the gaming market.

Frank Azor

We know that what we do on the product side, we will gain our fair share. If we build the right products and we compete effectively, we will get our fair share. But I'd rather have my fair share of a billion than my fair share of a million, you know. I'd rather have 25% of a billion than 100% of a million. So that's always been our strategy is how do we work with partners. That's why you talk you see us talk about what we're doing with Team Liquid, what we're doing with with Riot Games, how we're helping them with their technology needs.

We are not putting our logos on players t-shirts, that's not our strategy. That's what other companies do. Our strategies are much more integrated. We built an E-sports training facility with Team Liquid so that we can raise the bar and show people what's possible. We spoken about their accomplishments since we've done that so that other teams can take notice and say shit, we need to build something like this. That's all about lifting the sport, lifting the community of gamers and if we sell more computers out of it, cool, great.

But the only way we're going to really sell more computers is by having a great product at a great price. That's the only way you sell computers to be honest. Everything else we do is about lifting up the sport, lifting up the hobby, lifting up this ecosystem of gaming. That's what we love to do.