Team Liquid’s Call of Duty Blackout team is now their Apex Legends team, the organization announced on their website. This is one of the first notable events in Apex’s development as an esports title.

The team currently consists of four battle royale veterans, and they are looking for more. Tanner “Rogue” Trebb, Gage “Caliburn” Meyer, Thomas “Flanker” Cook, and Brenden “Casper” Marino have been duking it out against other squads since the Blackout team formed on Dec. 12 last year. All of them also boast considerable professional experience in PUBG and H1Z1 Pro League.

Alongside the announcement, Liquid’s Brenden “Casper” Marino tweeted about the team’s Proving Grounds initiative. It would seem that Team Liquid is putting out an open call for potential recruits. Anyone can apply, although much like in a Battle Royale, only a handful of skilled survivors will be accepted.

Switching off from Blackout

When discussing why the team made the decision to switch away from Blackout, Rogue explained:

The first thing would be that there wasn’t any interest from the devs for hosting any events or focusing on anything esport related for Blackout. It was mainly just third parties doing things on their own and supporting the scene. The devs never said anything, they hadn’t shown any interest, so when Apex Legends came out, and Respawn came out and said they would support the esport scene, most of the competitive Blackout players switched over. It didn’t help that Blackout is kind of struggling on PC either. Call of Duty has never been a big game on PC really, it’s always been primarily thought of as a console game, other than when it first came out back with Big Red and stuff like that. So there was no really big player count to hold over Twitch viewers and games would be dying out by 6pm or take forever to start, so it was a pretty easy switch for everybody.

Not only is this news big for the Apex scene, it tells us a lot about the Call of Duty Blackout esports scene as well. It would seem from this announcement that there’s very little support for a serious competitive scene around the game. With organizations like Team Liquid moving on, the future may be bleak for Blackout esports.

“It isn’t Fortnite”

Rogue also gave his thoughts on why Apex has blown up in such a big way, and what the game’s main draw is. “I think part of it is that it isn’t Fortnite honestly,” he explained. “It’s one of the first first-person shooter Battle Royales that also feels like it is worth the time that has been put into it.” He went on to say that Respawn should try to space out new Legend releases, so “the meta could sit for a bit, compared to Fortnite where they have huge changes before tournaments.”

The Liquid roster has already had a taste of the competitive Apex scene. They participated in the March 2 DLive Apex Tournament 2, taking 9th place out of 19 teams.

Does this development in the Apex scene surprise you? Do you think Blackout is losing steam already? Let us know in the comments below! For more Apex content, check out our “Top Streamers to watch guide” or go over our summary of the latest Apex Legends patch notes.