EA's head of broadcast on taking "calculated risks" with Apex Legends esports coverage

Apex Legends had only a handful of LAN show matches before the official esports scene truly kicked off in Krakow, Poland. The event has gone down in Apex Legends folklore, simply due to the fact that it's one of the only live, in-person events that the battle royale game has ever seen. The Finals went on for an astonishing 11 rounds before TSM was crowned the victor, and despite the match point system needing tweaks - as ALGS commissioner John Nelson told us last week - the Preseason Invitational was considered a success.

"That was a great opportunity to tell the story [of the tournament], because we had everybody there," explains EA's head of broadcast, Joe Lynch. "We could show all the players, we could show that emotion. When 789 was making their big runs out of nowhere, we could actually interview them, talk to them, and see the expression when they got finished. Or when TSM won the whole thing, we could see that excitement in them and we could tell that emotional story. That was a good start."

Lynch's most challenging task when broadcasting a battle royale tournament is simple: "How do you tell the story?" When he works on the broadcasts for other EA titles, things are much more simple. In FIFA and Madden, matches are 1v1 - the stories tell themselves. But with 20 teams and 60 players competing in Apex Legends Global Series tournaments, analysing and telling the stories of even a single match becomes a daunting task.

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