Maybe we'll get a new Wembley!
Strangely, I was contacted back in September by a source regarding Omega Sektor.... At that time our source was working for a consultancy firm engaged by Omega Sektor to try and get the business back on track and improve public perception.
An email sent to us by this source suggested that Omega Sektor seemed desperate to find sponsorship and people looking to host events at the venue. According to our source, it seems that the current management may have been uncertain of their next move and even seemed to lack experience in the UK gaming industry. It was apparently at that time that one attempted strategy to increase attendance was to jump on the back of the Wii bandwagon by creating the country's first Wii tennis court.
"They have just built the country’s first Wii courts, with support from Nintendo (I am still in the process of working out a deal for them). The courts are due to open in a few weeks - I am trying to get them to hold back the launch until they have engaged more people," reads and an email we saw on or around September 11th.
It seems Omega Sektor (and our source) didn't manage to engage as many more people as would be ideal, but it's not surprising - a Wii Court certainly sounds like a somewhat surprising measure from a venue that was always meant to be a haven for LAN gamers, the PC gaming equivalent to Wembley Stadium no less.
It certainly doesn't sound like the management at Omega Sektor lacked the passion (or indeed the financial resources), it just seems that they may have either simply lacked the know-how to make it work or people are simply not as interested as they used to be in attending LAN centres anymore and that good business sense has prevailed.
“The people that now [did] run it are ‘passionates’, or those that were there as staff when it first opened - not a bad basis to run a business but there is a slight lack of experience when it comes to communications,” wrote our source.
A recent poster on the Omega Sektor forums claims, possibly in one of the last desperate attempts to make it all work, that the downstairs of the venue had been recently refurbished. There's no doubt that Omega Sektor was an impressive venue, but unless one actually went inside of its fairly grubby exterior to have a look, then how would a prospective visitor even know?
As far as I can see, Omega Sektor could have been marketed much better, which is certainly one of the reasons, possibly amongst many, that have led to its downfall. Had I not been working in the industry then perhaps I would've never have known about this huge venue, despite frequenting dozens of gaming focussed websites and community discussion forums. Considering the amount of money that was reportedly spent on its interior at launch, the venue certainly warranted a huge profile but ultimately it seemed to hold little sustainable significance amongst the majority of the gaming fraternity.
We had high hopes for Omega Sektor and followed its progress right from the initial concept, even enthusiastically reporting upon developments when we could (a simple search on Google will tell you that). Perhaps the UK just wasn't ready for such an ambitious project- and if it isn't now, at a time when e-sports is apparently on the rise, perhaps it never will be.
R.I.P Omega Sektor
Since the article went live we were contacted by Dominic Mulroy of Gamerbase. Read his repsonse overleaf...
