After Team Overclockers failed to qualify from the League of Legends European Challenger league, what’s next for PC retailer Overclockers UK (OCUK) in the eSports space? Senior management executives reveal their plans to Leet.
OCUK was hoping its League of Legends team – formed and officially announced in June – would get through to the LCS qualifiers, but it ended up finishing fifth with two wins and eight losses, just one position away from the qualifying bracket.
The team (pictured above) was a well-known Polish Challenger Squad that had agreed to perform under the OCUK brand.
It’s a shame the group didn’t progress – OCUK was the UK’s first online PC retailer to form its own team (rather than just sponsor an existing pro team) and it could have really helped put the UK eSports scene on the map.
But this is not the end for the system builder. OCUK has told us it has big things planned in the eSports space, and is currently weighing up its options to potentially sponsor another team or form a new one.
“Everything has contractually finished [with our former team],” said Miodrag Relic, business development director for Caseking group (which owns Overclockers). “Because the season ended and they didn’t qualify, it was the end of their contract.
“We’re now evaluating other options – everything is on the table, whether it’s another team, sponsoring a league…
“Watch this space, most definitely we’ll be involved with eSports one way or the other. That is our crowd, it’s our customers and we’re one of them. We are part of the crowd, we are part of the community, so we will definitely be involved.
“We are evaluating some options, and will give ourselves a couple of months to reach a good decision, to create the right model. As you’ll appreciate, our goal as an etailer is to reach as many people as possible, so we’re evaluating now how we do that. So we could easily sponsor some league where you have hundreds of thousands of people participating, that could happen as well.”
Overclockers UK previously sponsored Counter-Strike tournament host RoomOnFire, and has also exhibited at Multiplay’s Insomnia events in the UK for years, while its PR exec Mark ‘Valkia’ Purdy also hosts his own Twitch channel. Watch this space for more developments.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.
