Electronic Arts trusts Flowics to deliver interactive, real-time game stats to its audience for its popular hero shooter esports championship, Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS). The gaming company uses Flowics native data connectors, the Flowics Middleware, and a custom Twitch extension to integrate live in-game data during the event broadcast live. 

More than 632,000 concurrent viewers logged 11.2 million hours watching the teams compete in the finale of the $5 million prize pool during last year’s Apex Legends Global Series, shattering previous records, on EA’s official Twitch channel.  

To create excitement and bring audiences even closer to the action, EA Sports adds automatic live team standings and other game stats to be shown as an overlay on the full screen Twitch broadcast.  

The game is incredibly fast-paced, and the standings must be in sync with the broadcast. To achieve this, we built a custom Apex Legends Twitch overlay. With it, viewers could control the experience by toggling the extension in or out at any time to check the status of the various teams, like which team had the most points, which ones were still alive, and if any teams were on Match Point. Populating the extension and other graphics with up-to-the-minute statistics required a data connector — the connection between the graphics engine and the live data source.  

Ordinarily, Flowics data connectors pull information from third-party data providers via APIs in the cloud. But in this case, the Apex Legends data was only available on-premises, leading to additional challenges in the workflow. 

Leveraging our existing data connector architecture, we purpose-built an Apex Legends data connector that pulled information directly from the local Apex Legends network. A local instance of the Flowics Middleware read and processed the local events log from the game engine and pushed real-time data to the Flowics Graphics cloud-based graphics engine. With this workflow in place, EA Sports delivers interactive and real-time game stats to viewers through the custom overlay extension on Twitch. 

Flowics built a custom Apex Legends Twitch overlay extension with automatic live team standings and other game stats.

Flowics built a custom Apex Legends Twitch overlay extension with automatic live team standings and other game stats. 

EA Sports complimented the fan experience with a second full screen “leaderboard” broadcast showing the team standings, only this time with more detailed information about each team. 

Using Flowics Graphics, operators easily created real-time, data-driven graphics that showed information for each of the 20 teams in the tournament, featuring all the key statistics in esports from status and total points to individual kills and match legends.  

EA Sports first deployed the Flowics solution into action for the finals of the ALGS Pro League Split 2 Playoffs (the qualifying rounds for the World Finale). The success of that event led to Flowics being chosen for the ALGS season’s main event — the ALGS Year 2 Championship.  
  
Our work with EA Sports is a great example of how the Flowics platform can help create a more engaging esports broadcast. We are continuously expanding our solutions in the esports industry and are excitedly working towards the future where on-screen graphics can be controllable and customizable in the cloud. 

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