MOUZ considering Valorant team: “Pretty good fit for us”

MOUZ are weighing up a potential expansion into Valorant, Jan Dominicus, the organization’s Chief Business Development Officer, has told Dexerto.

Rumors have been gathering pace about MOUZ’s potential entrance into the Valorant scene since the rebranding video released by the German organization on October 14.

The video shows a computer desktop background containing an image of MOUZ’s new logo and eight desktop icons. One of them is from partner Razer and six from games in which the organization is competing, including Counter-Strike and League of Legends.

But the one icon that has got people talking belongs to Valorant, a game that MOUZ are yet to enter, more than a year after it was officially released by Riot Games.

Monitoring Valorant

Jan Dominicus, MOUZ’s Chief Business Development Officer, confirmed that an entrance into Valorant is part of the organization’s plans and explained how the game ticks a lot of very important boxes for them.

“We are monitoring Valorant and its community,” he told Dexerto. “We think it’s very interesting and that it has a long of things going for it. For example, a publisher that has proven to be successful in building esports games and the ecosystem around them, which already makes it interesting

“It also has a very active community and is a pretty good fit for MOUZ in the sense that we’ve always been focused on FPS games and have a long history in them.

“All these factors make it a very interesting game for us. We’re following it very closely, and if we can find the right opportunity we are certainly going to be interested in pursuing that.”

He acknowledged that MOUZ have had several opportunities to expand into Valorant, which was officially released on 12 June 2020.

Interest in the competitive side of Valorant has grown in 2021 as Riot Games continue to reveal details about their vision for the future of the game’s esports scene. The upcoming Valorant Champions will be the third international LAN of the year, after the Masters events in Reykjavík and Berlin.

According to Dominicus, MOUZ will only enter Valorant with a team they can identify with, pointing to their tradition of building long-term relationships with their esports stars.

“For us, it’s more about finding the right opportunity to enter, with the right players who fit our philosophy,” he explained. “We have never been a team that just gets the most established players. We need to find the most talented players early [in their development] and help them improve.

“An organization like MOUZ – and I assume it’s similar to most other known organizations in Europe – gets approached by all sorts of different teams on an almost daily basis. But I think it’s important that we make a good entrance and we find a group that we can work with long term, with a core that we will work with for the foreseeable future.

“In CS, Robin [ropz] has been with us for over for years, David [frozen] is approaching the three-year mark. Our Starcraft player, HeRoMaRinE, has been with us for almost ten years. Our Street Fighter player, Problem X, has been with us for four years.

“For us, it’s all about finding the right personalities, the right teams that we can work with long term.”

More updates in the pipeline

These are exciting times in the MOUZ camp. After announcing their new, modernized logo and formally adopting an all-caps shortened version of the mousesports name, they are close to revealing a new line of merchandise. An announcement is expected before PGL Major Stockholm, which begins on October 26.

But that’s not all. Dominicus confirmed that the organization are moving forward with plans for a new headquarters in Hamburg. The new facility will allow MOUZ to create a better working environment and deepen their connection with fans.

“It has been one of our main projects for the last 18 months, and I’m super excited about how it’s going,” he said. “We hope to share more about that later in the year.

“We want to build better infrastructure and a better environment for our players to develop, which has been our philosophy in the past and will be even more so in the future.

“We want to be a team that gives opportunities to ambitious young players for them to become professionals in the esports world.”