PGL Esports
Live graphics for esports world championships
Real-time broadcast graphics for audiences of up to 2.7M concurrent viewers, including the Sports Emmy-winning The International 10.
Context
PGL produces some of the biggest esports events in the world. Every overlay, bracket and statistic on screen is live software that cannot fail on air.
What I did
- Took over a business-critical live-graphics project after its only React developer left, rewrote it to modern React with hooks while shipping new features, then led React across all PGL projects.
- Built and operated complete graphics packages for 10+ world championships: The International 2021 and 2022, PGL Majors Stockholm, Antwerp and Arlington, the ALGS 2022 Championship, Brawl Stars World Finals and FIFA Global Series.
- Built real-time in-game overlays fed by live match data, plus brackets, statistics, schedules and the multi-view live feature.
- Ran on-air graphics as live broadcast technical engineer, following the show rundown in real time.
- Optimized graphics assets for vMix, removing real-time lag on air and unlocking features that performance limits had blocked.
- Built a boilerplate used by every project after it, and an Electron one-click installer that set up the full production environment on broadcast machines.
Outcome
- A new graphics package went from 2–3 days of work to under one day.
- Broadcasts peaked at 2.7M+ concurrent viewers.
- The International 10 broadcast won the 2022 Sports Emmy for Outstanding Esports Championship Coverage.