Europe's largest PC Gaming Centre may have lost its title with the replacement of more than 250 PC's with games consoles. Thanks to our own Corin Cole, Cadred gets the scoop.

When launched Omega Sektor Birmingham seemed set to revolutionize the British LAN scene, offering tournament organizers a central, cheap, and highly specified venue to host non-BYOC tournaments. Yet today Cadred uncovered a huge reshuffle in the way the centre is being used, moving the focus away from PC and towards the casual console market.

With the changes happening we'll be seeing a lot less of these.

The Cut-Back

When the doors were first opened back in August of last year, OS claimed over 450 highly specified gaming rigs. The reshuffle sees this figure slashed by anything between a third and three quarters, with a representative of the Omega Sektor management giving Cadred the vague figure of “the best part of 200 PCs will remain”.

The “best part of 200” could mean anything from 101 to 199, but a much more likely figure is around the 140 mark. Cadred has also been told by a confidential source that this could be only the first stage of cuts, with the final figure of remaining PCs being as low as 40-20. This puts a huge question mark of the future of events at Omega Sektor, ranging from the Infinity Gaming LAN series to the Championship Gaming Series UK and European qualifiers.

A Bad Track Record

This is not the first time Omega Sektor has caused an upset when it comes to the number of PCs they have, we can now reveal that having allowed GameFrontier to book 300 PC places for theSGL Summer Slam, of which 265 were sold directly to participants, SGL's admin team was to arrive at the event to find some 75 machines less than the OS staff had believed to be in the building. Gamers at the event have reported "a look of total shock on the Duty Manager's face after being chalelnged by theSGL|uzi to go and count his machines, finding he had only 225 PCs in the venue", a problem that was inflamed the next day when it turned out they had also double booked 20 of the machines for a children's party on the Sunday of the event.

Why the changes?

Our confidential source also suggested that the PCs taken from Birmingham would be heading to a new centre named "OS1" in Kazakhstan.

It would seem that the first Omega Sektor to come to the UK has not been the success they had hoped, and this move to a more console-fueled venue could be a move based on the popularity of consoles compared to PCs over the last year, or it could be a last desperate attempt to turn fortune around for a company that has seen managerial replacements over the last month.

The Statements

This full statement from a member of the Omega Sektor Management was given to Cadred's Corin Cole over the phone:

We're putting a Nintendo Wii area downstairs, obviously we've had to clear out PCs to make areas for it, it's going to be basically like squash courts with Nintendo Wiis in there, so we're refurbishing downstairs and we're putting them in there. Because we've done that we've had to clear the space where there were PCs.

It's not like we've become exclusively consoles or anything like that, we'll still have the best part of 200 PCs.

Cadred spoke to Infinity Gaming’s Phillip Wride on his thoughts on the change:

It is a shame that OS is changing its focus slightly and reducing the number of PCs available. At the moment we would like to think this won’t affect IG that much but will have to wait and see how the new layout looks and which rooms they are removing the PCs from. We are currently looking to start discussions with them about IG6 and hopefully will have some more information shortly about the proposed changes.

This is certainly a dissapointing move for the future of non-BYOC LANs in the UK, but with Gamerbase in London doing extremely well we may see a company come in to fill the void.